By Dean Saunders, Saunders Real Estate
Florida is booming. With more than 23 million residents and new arrivals every day, we are the fastest-growing state in the nation. Now that the Florida Legislature is back in session, Florida faces a narrowing window to act: Without immediate investment, we risk falling behind in protecting the lands that sustain our communities.
For decades, Florida has been a national leader in land conservation. That leadership came from deliberate investments that recognized conservation as a strategic tool; supporting agriculture, safeguarding water resources, buffering communities from flooding and preserving the quality of life that continues to draw people here.
Today, that legacy is under strain. Not because public support has waned, but because rural land values have increased roughly fivefold since the 1990s, while conservation funding has remained anchored to the levels established decades ago. Each year that funding fails to keep pace with the land market, Florida loses ground and opportunities to preserve critical lands slip away.
I’ve seen this shift firsthand. As an eighth-generation Floridian, the founder of Saunders Real Estate and a former legislator who authored Florida’s conservation easement framework in the 1990s, I’ve spent my career at the intersection of land policy and land markets.
Since 2012, our firm has tracked every major land transaction statewide through the annual Lay of the Land Market Report, powered by Atlas, our proprietary mapping and analytics platform. By collecting, verifying, and visualizing real estate data, Atlas shows just how quickly rural and agricultural land values are rising and how dramatically purchasing power has eroded as a result.
In the 1990s, Florida protected land primarily through fee-simple acquisitions, supported by a roughly $300 million conservation budget. Conservation easements later allowed the state to stretch those dollars further by protecting land without purchasing it outright. They remain an effective tool, but only if funding reflects current land values.
What once protected thousands of acres now preserves only a fraction of that land.
The result is a troubling reality: Despite strong voter support and sustained legislative effort, Florida is moving backward. Development pressure continues to intensify, land prices climb and conservation dollars buy less each year. To simply keep pace with today’s land market, Florida needs to invest $1 billion to $1.5 billion annually in conservation funding.
This is not a critique of past efforts. The Legislature has made meaningful investments, and Floridians consistently support conservation initiatives at the local level. But without scaling funding to match today’s market conditions, the state risks irreversible loss of working lands, natural systems and the resilience they provide.
Growth and conservation are not mutually exclusive. With thoughtful, data-driven investment, Florida can continue to welcome new residents and businesses while preserving the lands, water and communities that make our state exceptional. But delay comes at a steep cost and time is not on our side.
Dean Saunders, ALC, CCIM, is founder, managing director and senior advisor of Saunders Real Estate. A nationally recognized authority on Florida land and conservation, Saunders has helped preserve more than 300,000 acres through conservation easements. He previously served in the Florida House of Representatives and as an advisor to Sen. and Gov. Lawton Chiles. This opinion piece was originally published by Florida Today and other newspapers in the USA Today Network-Florida, which are media partners of The Invading Sea. Banner photo: Land being cleared for development (iStock image).
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