Florida Feasibility Study Consultants

SBA Lending in Florida: The Current Picture

Florida ranks among the top three SBA states, behind California and Texas, and its share of the national program keeps rising. Florida lenders approved a record 6,302 SBA 7(a) loans worth $3.22 billion in fiscal 2025. That is about 8.6 percent of national 7(a) dollars, up from 8.1 percent in fiscal 2023 and 7.6 percent in fiscal 2022. Both of the state’s SBA district offices are setting records. The North Florida District, covering 43 counties from Orlando to the Panhandle, financed nearly $1.2 billion in fiscal 2025, up 21 percent. The South Florida District approved $2.56 billion ^Corrected in fiscal 2024. TD Bank led South Florida’s 7(a) lending and Florida Business Development Corporation its 504 lending, while Live Oak Bank leads real estate-secured 7(a) lending statewide. More than four in five of those loans come from lenders headquartered outside Florida.

The credit record makes a clear case for real estate. Florida 7(a) loans with real estate terms of twenty years or more, approved between fiscal 2020 and 2022, have recorded just 6 charge-offs ^Corrected out of 1,740 loans ^Corrected. Shorter-term working-capital and acquisition loans from the same years have charged off at 7.52 percent ^Corrected. Hotels, restaurants, child care centers, assisted living facilities and medical and dental practices lead those real estate loans. Demand, however, is cooling. Through June 2026, Florida’s real estate-term 7(a) loans were down 23.3 percent ^Corrected in count from the same months a year earlier. Nationally, fiscal 2026 approvals fell to 56,130 7(a) loans worth $32.4 billion and 6,075 504 loans worth $7.1 billion. SOP 50 10 8.1, effective 1 October 2026, now requires 1.25x debt service coverage on historical earnings for business acquisitions. It also caps seller notes and passive investor equity at half of the 10 percent injection, and requires a Quality of Earnings report at $3 million and above. For seasonal and tourism businesses whose trailing financials include a hurricane year, that historical test is the new hurdle.

The practical point for a borrower or lender searching for a feasibility study consultant in Florida is that the document is not a box-checking exercise. Startup projects, change-of-ownership transactions where the buyer has no operating history at the site, and ground-up construction with no existing revenue to underwrite all need it. In each case, the feasibility study is the analysis that lets a credit committee size the deal with confidence. A Florida feasibility study company that understands both the SBA standard operating procedures and the local submarket is doing two jobs at once: satisfying a federal documentation requirement and giving the lender a defensible basis for its credit decision. Outside the coastal metros, USDA Business and Industry lending runs alongside the SBA programs, and in Florida it is largely a hospitality-finance program. Recent guarantees have financed hotels in Kissimmee, Starke, Perry and Lake City, and a $25 million Hyatt Place in New Smyrna Beach. Most of Florida’s land area falls outside cities of 50,000 or more, and eligibility is confirmed at the address level, not by county.

Where Florida Is Growing: Population and County Demographics

Florida remains the third-most-populous state, at 23,462,518 residents as of July 2025, and it added 196,680 people in a year, second only to Texas. Growth of 0.85 percent is well below Florida’s historic pace, and its source has changed. Net international migration brought 178,674 residents, the most of any state. Net domestic migration added only 22,517, about an eighth as many. The story is no longer uniform growth across the peninsula. It is sharp divergence between metros, and even between neighboring counties, and that divergence is the single most important fact for any demand analysis.

Central Florida and the exurban belt lead. The Orlando-Kissimmee-Sanford region added 37,690 residents to reach 2,957,672, the tenth-largest metro gain in the nation, though slower than its 2.0 percent pace a year earlier. Osceola County alone added 15,842. Lakeland-Winter Haven grew 2.7 percent, the fourth-fastest rate of any U.S. metro, with Polk County adding 23,356 residents, and St. Johns County was the state’s fastest-growing county at 3.9 percent. At the other end, several large coastal counties lost population. Pinellas County declined by 11,834 residents, the second-largest county loss in the country. Miami-Dade fell by 10,115 to 2,802,029, the third-largest loss, though it remains the seventh-largest county in the United States. Miami-Dade lost a record 72,254 residents to other parts of the country, offset only partly by immigration, and Broward and Palm Beach also recorded large domestic outflows.

For a feasibility study, these trajectories are the raw material of demand. Trade-area population, household formation and absorption assumptions all stand or fall on county and submarket growth. A project that pencils cleanly in a booming Osceola or Polk County corridor can fail in a coastal county that is losing residents. Growth now depends heavily on immigration, so demand cannot be read from the state’s headline number. The Florida label alone tells a lender almost nothing; the work is in the trade area.

Florida Commercial Real Estate: The Five Major Markets

A Florida feasibility study lives or dies on which asset class is in question, because the five major commercial real estate sectors are moving in different directions across the state’s metros.

Industrial has split in two. Miami is the tightest market in the state, at 5.6 to 7.7 percent vacancy depending on the brokerage. It was the only Florida metro where vacancy fell over the past year, and third-quarter absorption was its strongest since 2023. Everywhere else, vacancy sits above the 6.8 percent national rate. Orlando runs at 8.7 to 10.6 percent, with about 3.5 million square feet under construction that is almost entirely unleased. Tampa is at 8.0 to 8.2 percent, and Jacksonville at 9.4 to 11.6 percent. Asking rents nonetheless set records in Orlando and Tampa, up 10 to 11 percent in a year. That gap between rising rents and rising vacancy is exactly the question an industrial feasibility study must answer, and speculative space in Orlando and Jacksonville warrants long lease-up assumptions. Multifamily is turning in Miami: occupancy reached 94.7 percent, rents rose for the first time after five quarters of declines, and absorption exceeded deliveries for the first time since 2022. The pipeline remains heavy, at between 15,500 and 20,900 units, roughly a tenth of Miami’s inventory. Orlando rents are flat, and Tampa rents are down 2.7 percent with vacancy near 8.8 percent.

The other three sectors complete the spread. Office is a genuine national bright spot in South Florida. Yardi Matrix ranks the region first among the top 25 U.S. markets for asking-rent growth: West Palm Beach and Boca Raton rose 21 percent in a year, Fort Lauderdale 16 percent and Miami 7 percent, against 2.4 percent nationally. Miami’s 13.2 percent vacancy is the lowest of any major office market. Retail is among the tightest in the nation, with Miami-Dade vacancy at 3.1 percent, the lowest in the state, and Tampa and Orlando under 4 percent. Hospitality is Florida’s signature sector. The state drew a record 143 million visitors in 2024, who spent $134.9 billion and supported 1.8 million jobs. Visitation was flat in 2025, however, and Canadian visitors fell 14 percent in the first half of 2026, a meaningful shift for snowbird-dependent markets. That divergence between sectors is precisely the question a lender asks a feasibility study to resolve.

Feasibility Studies by Asset Class in Florida

Commercial financing in Florida divides by property type, and each asset class a feasibility study covers turns on different questions. A hotel feasibility study in Florida depends on demand segmentation across leisure, group and business travel in a specific submarket, set against existing and planned room supply. It carries unusual weight here: hotels lead Florida’s SBA real estate lending, dominate USDA guarantees, and now face a softer Canadian market. A gas station and convenience store feasibility study hinges on traffic counts, fuel volumes, the competitive set within the trade area, and the inside sales and food service that increasingly drive c-store margins. A car wash feasibility study turns on rooftops, daily traffic and the membership model that now defines express-tunnel economics.

An RV park or campground feasibility study weighs Florida’s seasonal and snowbird demand against the conversion of transient stays into longer ones, and it now has to test exposure to Canadian visitors. A multifamily feasibility study tests trade-area household formation and absorption against the apartment pipeline in that specific submarket, which matters enormously given how concentrated Florida’s supply has become. A self-storage feasibility study measures square feet per capita against current and planned inventory in the immediate radius. An assisted living or senior housing feasibility study models the age-qualified population, penetration rates and acuity mix, in a state that remains a national retirement destination. A child care, restaurant or franchise feasibility study weighs local demand and competitive density against the operator’s unit economics. An industrial or warehouse feasibility study tests logistics access, clear height, power and the absorption of comparable space nearby. Each of these is a distinct analysis with its own demand drivers. A market as varied as Miami, Orlando, Tampa, Jacksonville and the rural interior cannot be served by a generic template that simply swaps in the word Florida.

Construction Costs: The Florida Picture

Hard costs feed straight into total project cost, loan sizing and the debt-service coverage a lender stress-tests, so a current read on construction inflation belongs in every Florida feasibility study. Mortenson’s Construction Cost Index release for the third quarter of 2026 put national nonresidential costs up 1.58 percent for the quarter and 5.60 percent year over year. Mortenson does not track any Florida market, so the national figure is a baseline, not a local reading, and Florida budgets need live local bids.

What the national index does not capture is the set of cost factors specific to building and operating in Florida. Florida’s building codes are among the most demanding in the country because of hurricane and wind-load requirements, which raise the cost of the structure, the envelope and the roof. Coastal and flood-zone construction adds elevation and foundation costs, and post-storm rebuilding periodically tightens trades across whole regions. Insurance, long the most volatile line in a Florida budget, has turned. Citizens, the state-backed insurer, has shrunk from 1.41 million policies at its 2023 peak to about 293,000, its lowest in twenty-five years. Reinsurance costs fell 15 to 30 percent in 2026, and private commercial property premiums are running 20 to 40 percent below a year earlier. Citizens’ own commercial rates are still rising, so the savings depend on which market the property is insured in. A feasibility study earns its keep by building the cost and operating side of the pro forma from current insurance quotes and local conditions, not from 2023’s crisis assumptions or a national average.

What a Florida Feasibility Study Consultant Delivers

Read the lending, demographic and market data together and the assignment becomes concrete. Florida sends a record number of projects to credit committees, concentrated in hospitality and owner-occupied real estate, and the new SBA rules now demand historical proof on every acquisition. Growth driven by immigration and concentrated in the exurban belt, while large coastal counties lose residents, means a demand case has to be built at the submarket level. Five commercial real estate sectors pointing in different directions mean asset selection drives the outcome. Construction and insurance costs that differ sharply from the national pattern, in both directions, mean a budget assembled a year ago is already stale.

A feasibility study consultant brings those threads together into a single third-party document written for the lender’s file. What distinguishes a credible Florida feasibility study company is independence and evidence. The consultant is independent of both borrower and lender, and the conclusions rest on verifiable trade-area demographics, a documented competitive supply analysis, demand and absorption modeling, financial projections, and sensitivity testing organized around what a credit committee actually reviews. SBA and USDA guidelines call for exactly this kind of independent study on many startup, expansion and new-construction projects, and the lender typically orders it once the deal is in underwriting.

The state’s investment profile sharpens the need for current data. Florida’s economy reached $1.81 trillion in 2025, the fourth-largest of any state, and grew close to 3 percent in real terms against 2.1 percent nationally, among the fastest of any state. Real estate is its largest industry, and tourism, aerospace, logistics, financial services and health care all continue to expand the base, supported by the absence of a state personal income tax. Property taxes are about to change as well. On 3 November 2026, Florida voters approved Amendment 3 with about 62 percent of the vote, according to unofficial results. It raises the homestead exemption and cuts the annual assessment cap on non-homestead property, including commercial and multifamily real estate, from 10 percent to 5 percent. That limits property-tax growth in long-hold pro formas, but it may push local governments toward higher millage rates and fees, so a study should model both sides. Each of those forces reshapes trade-area demand, labor demand and absorption in the markets around it. None of it shows up in a generic template, which is the entire reason a project-specific study exists.

Work With a Florida Feasibility Study Consultant

Loan Analytics prepares independent feasibility studies for SBA 7(a), SBA 504 and USDA-financed projects across Florida, built on the same data published on this page and extended to the subject property. The study arrives as a third-party document, written for the lender’s file. It covers trade-area demographics, competitive supply, demand and absorption, insurance and operating costs, financial projections, and sensitivity testing. To scope one, use the form below or write to Info@analytics.loan. Include the property type, the county and the loan program, and we come back with scope and timeline.