Best Places to Retire Have the Weakest Home-Price Forecasts

Picture the classic American retirement move: sell the northern house, chase the sun, land somewhere with palm trees and a golf cart. Sarasota. Naples. Fort Myers. Phoenix. The Villages. Now here is the uncomfortable thing our model found when we scored every U.S. county on projected home-price growth: those exact places sit at the bottom of the forecast.

Sarasota County, Florida scores a 5 out of 100 on the Boom Town Index. Lee County — Fort Myers and Cape Coral — also scores 5. Collier County, home to Naples and its $540,700 median home, scores 7. Maricopa County (Phoenix) scores 8. Clark County (Las Vegas) scores 9. Even Sumter County, which holds most of The Villages, the country's largest 55-plus retirement community (Wikipedia), only manages a 22. The places retirees love most are the places our forecast likes least.

The sunshine premium is already in the price

The pattern is not a handful of cherry-picked counties. Rank every U.S. county by its natural-amenity score — the government's measure of warm winters, mild summers, water and topography — and the forecast slides in a straight line. The coldest, least scenic fifth of counties averages a Boom Town Index score of 60 and a projected 30.4% five-year gain. The warmest, most scenic fifth averages a score of 33 and a 23.7% gain. Warmer means weaker, all the way down.

That is the same signal we found when we looked purely at weather: America's best-weather counties carry the weakest home-price forecasts. Retirement demand just makes the effect personal. Decades of snowbirds have already bid these markets up, so a Naples home costs more than double the national median. When a place is already expensive relative to what locals earn, there is simply less room left to run.

Our model does not hand out reasons for individual counties — it is a gradient-boosting algorithm weighing 30 signals, from price momentum and incomes to permits and property taxes. But the shape of the result is consistent with plain valuation math: cheap-relative-to-income homes have room to drift back toward fair value, and already-appreciated amenity markets do not. Call it the model betting on catch-up, and refusing to pay twice for the same sunshine.

Where the forecast actually points

The counties our model likes best for home-price growth are, almost to a fault, the opposite of a retirement brochure. Elkhart County, Indiana scores 96 with a 39.4% projected gain. Cole County, Missouri — Jefferson City — scores 94. Logan County, Oklahoma scores 88; Kosciusko County, Indiana 87; Hancock County, Ohio 77. They share a profile: homes around $210,000–$230,000, low property-tax rates, healthy enough life expectancy — and a natural-amenity score that runs negative. Cold winters, no beach, nobody making TikToks about them.