On the Grand Strand of South Carolina, a 1.66-acre oceanfront parcel sold for $3.3 million in 2024. The old house and guest cottage were knocked down. The land was carved into three lots expected to list at roughly $3.4 million each. The real estate agent made sure to mention they sit in an X flood zone. No flood insurance required.
That detail used to be a footnote. Now it's a selling point, like granite countertops or a three-car garage. When the absence of flood insurance becomes a luxury amenity, you are watching a community change hands.
Drive the beachfront in Horry and Georgetown counties and you can see the sorting in progress. As of late 2025, there are no vacant residential lots on the direct oceanfront listed for sale in either county. The median price for a beachfront home has more than doubled since 2019, from $1 million to $2.1 million. Where the old cottages stood, the ones with jalousie windows and screened porches and twenty years of salt in the wood, new construction is going up at price points that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Meanwhile the condo market behind them carries 8.2 months of supply, highest since 2016, and single-family homes in Horry County sit on the market an average of 117 days. The front row is being remade. The rows behind it are going soft.
FEMA's Risk Rating 2.0 took full effect in April 2023. The old system grouped properties by zone. The new one prices each structure individually: distance to water, elevation, flood type, replacement cost. Primary residences face annual increases capped at 18 percent. Second homes and investment properties, which is most of the Grand Strand beachfront, are capped at 25 percent. New buyers with no existing policy pay the full actuarial rate on day one. No glide path. No grandfather clause. The GAO estimates it will take until 2037 for 95 percent of current policies to reach full actuarial rates. Nine percent of policyholders will eventually face increases exceeding 300 percent.
A homeowner on Pawleys Island, house built in 1976, west side of the marsh, high-risk flood zone, watched his premium more than double. The house has never flooded. He has never filed a claim. He shopped around, switched to private insurance, refinanced his mortgage to manage the cost. Then he told The Sun News the thing that matters:
"I feel for people that have a tighter budget than I do, because I don't see how they're doing it frankly."
They're not doing it. On Hilton Head Island, the floodplain administrator reports over 2,000 NFIP policies dropped. She asked FEMA how she was supposed to convince residents on Social Security that $2,500 a year was manageable. There was no concrete answer because there is no concrete answer. The answer is those residents sell, or they carry no insurance and pray, and when the next storm comes they discover that FEMA disaster grants cover pennies on the dollar.
The broader market tells the story in its own language. Building permits fell from 13,176 in 2023 to 7,331 in 2024. But pending sales in the million-dollar-plus range rose 1.6 percent. Affordable inland markets around Conway are ticking up while high-end coastal areas show modest price drops. First-time and middle-income buyers are retreating from the coast. Cash-heavy investors and second-home purchasers, drawn by the short-term rental market, fill the space behind them. Nobody announced this. No program was established, no governor held a press conference. The sorting happens one renewal notice at a time, quiet as the tide.
FEMA is charging what the risk actually costs. The old system underpriced beachfront mansions and cross-subsidized them with premiums from modest inland homes. That was the real scandal, and nobody called it one because the people benefiting had better lobbyists. Risk Rating 2.0 is fairer by any honest measure. The fair price happens to be a machine for replacing one kind of community with another. The retired teacher who bought a cottage on Pawleys Island in 1988 and the fund manager who tears it down to build three luxury lots are both responding rationally to the same set of prices. One of them can keep responding.
The Sun News put it plainly: "At some point, the only people who will be able to live on the coast are those who can pull the money together comfortably." Along the Grand Strand, the old lots keep selling. The new construction keeps rising, higher and more expensive, on ground that carries no flood insurance requirement at all.