As more people move into Seminole County every year, they will find it increasingly difficult to buy a new home as large swaths of vacant property to build residential subdivisions diminishes in one of the state’s smallest but most densely populated counties, officials said.

“We’re running out of land very quickly to build on, so we definitely have a supply and demand problem,” Seminole Property Appraiser David Johnson said this week during a presentation before county commissioners. “We’re not going to have people saying: ‘We’re not moving to Seminole County.’ And that’s because of the quality of life. So, we’re going to have to figure out a place where to put these folks at some point. … We are critically underhoused in this county.”

That increase in demand and drop in supply will continue to raise property values and rent prices, analysts said. The median sales price of existing single-family homes in Seminole bumped up by more than 14% in the past year from $314,250 in 2020 to $359,000 in 2021, according to county data. And the median sale price of a new townhome last year was $346,350, a jump of nearly 11% from the previous year.

It also means that more apartment buildings with 300 units or more are expected to go up in Seminole’s core, particularly along the U.S. Highway 17-92 corridor between Casselberry and Sanford, as land becomes scarce and developers look to build up, Johnson said.

His office estimated that 3,240 apartment units are scheduled to be built in Seminole this year. Renters will find eye-popping prices. The current average rent for apartments in the Seminole area, which includes Maitland, is $1,672, well above the national average of $1,570, according to CoStar Group, a real estate analysis firm. And a year from now, the average rent is expected to soar to $1,825.

But it’s not just in Seminole. Rent in the metro Orlando area — which includes Seminole, Orange, Osceola and Lake — climbed 24.3% in 2021, faster than in any other area in the South, according to CoStar. “We have a supply and demand imbalance Seminole’s growth, lack of vacant land, means rising housing costs in most of the Orlando area,” said Lisa McNatt, director of Market Analytics for CoStar Group in Orlando. “And even though the metro area has 16,000 new apartment units under construction, it’s not enough to offset the robust renter demand from in-migration.”

Seminole also is moving away from becoming a bedroom community for Orlando and Orange County, as more businesses move into the county and residents find professional jobs closer to home. “We’re becoming more urbanized,” Johnson said, pointing to large corporations, including Verizon and Deloitte, that have moved into the Lake Mary area over the past two decades. Seminole residents “realize that they don’t have to get on I-4 every morning to go to work in Orange County and come back home every night. We have our own economic incubator or dynamics that were not there 20 years ago.”

Today, about 65% of Seminole’s total value of its property tax roll is residential and 35% is commercial property. About 30 years ago, it was 85% residential and 15% commercial. By comparison, about 51% of Orange County’s total value of its property tax roll is residential and 49% is commercial, according to data from the Orange County Property Appraiser’s Office.

The sale of commercial properties in Seminole more than tripled in the past year from $425 million in 2020 to $1.3 billion in 2021. Seminole’s population is expected to jump by nearly 11% from the current 475,000 residents to 526,400 in 2030. However, at 309 square miles, Seminole is the fourth-smallest county in Florida. And about one-third of Seminole is protected from high-density development, including within the rural boundary east of the Econlockhatchee River, where development is limited to one home per five acres or one home per 10 acres.

“We all know that we’re very small geographically. So that’s an issue we’re going to have to address as we move forward” in planning for future growth, Johnson said to commissioners. Commissioners said people wanting to move to Seminole is not a bad thing. “What makes us special is that people will want to move here because of our quality of life,” Commissioner Lee Constantine said. “So we want to make sure that our quality of life stays at a premium.” mcomas@orlandosentinel.com