Rental / DSCR in West Palm Beach

Because Palm Beach County is the highest-cost mainland county in Florida to insure a house, ahead of both of its southern neighbors. As of March 31, 2026, the average homeowners premium including wind ran $6,323 in Palm Beach County, against $6,136 in Broward and $5,975 in Miami-Dade; statewide, only Monroe County (the Keys) runs higher. Against an inland county like Orange at $3,610, that is roughly $2,713 a year of extra carry on an otherwise similar house, and the full $6,323 premium eats more than two months of rent on a $2,400-a-month unit. Get a bound insurance quote on the actual parcel before we lock your DSCR ratio, not a metro-average guess.

Only if you underwrite the association, not just the unit. The county's condo value index is down 5.8% year over year and 17.0% off its November 2023 peak (Zillow ZHVI, June 2026), while single-family is down just 0.6% over the same year, and the split tracks straight to post-Surfside law: buildings of three or more habitable stories must complete a milestone inspection by 30 years of age (or 25, at a local building department's option) and a structural integrity reserve study every 10 years, and associations can no longer vote to underfund reserves on those items. The oldest garden-condo stock has been hit hardest: Century Village is down 15.1% year over year, Palm Springs 10.3%, Delray Beach condo 9.6%. A unit that looks lower-cost against its 2023 peak can still be behind on inspections or facing a special assessment, and that commonly makes it non-warrantable for agency financing, which is exactly the gap a DSCR loan fills. If you're buying to rehab an older unit before you hold it long-term, our fix and flip loan can bridge the purchase.

Ignore the 1.02% figure you'll find online: that blends homesteaded property carrying decades of Save Our Homes caps, and an investor doesn't get that cap. Florida resets the assessment cap on change of ownership and only gives an investor the 10% non-homestead cap, not the homestead 3% cap. On the county's 2025 adopted millage, that works out to roughly 1.42% of assessed value in Royal Palm Beach or Jupiter, 1.59% in Boca Raton, 2.04% in West Palm Beach, and 2.22% in Mangonia Park, before any fire-rescue or library district adders. Talk to your CPA about your specific position, but budget off the mill rate for your municipality, not the seller's tax bill.

Rent is not the problem in this county; carry is. The county-wide rent index (all property types) hit $2,662 a month in June 2026, up 2.5% year over year, and submarket rents are climbing 2 to 4% across working areas like West Palm Beach, Boynton Beach, and Palm Beach Gardens while home values are flat to slightly down. That combination widens the yield on a purchase made today. What offsets it is the insurance line above and a millage stack that runs from about 14.7 mills in Wellington to over 20 mills in West Palm Beach. A Palm Beach County DSCR file rarely fails on rent. It fails on carry, so run the actual insurance quote and tax bill through the DSCR calculator before you assume the deal pencils.

Only after you confirm the parcel's zoning, and in the City of West Palm Beach that answer is usually no. Multiple 2026 legal sources report a six-month-and-one-day minimum rental term for most residential property inside the city, with shorter stays permitted only in transient lodging zoning, certain commercial districts, or approved mixed-use developments. We will not quote a code section we could not verify in the city's own published code, so confirm zoning with the city planning department before you underwrite nightly income. Countywide, Palm Beach County charges a 6% tourist development tax on rentals of six months or less, and the county tax collector is explicit that platforms like Airbnb do not remit it for you; the host has to register and file. Palm Beach County has 39 municipalities, each frozen at whatever short-term-rental ordinance it had adopted by June 1, 2011 under Florida's state preemption, so a rule that applies in one town does not carry to the next one.

It means a countywide average tells you nothing; we underwrite the submarket. June 2026 home values (Zillow ZHVI) run $2,145,595 in the town of Palm Beach against $210,145 in Pahokee, a 10-to-1 spread inside one county, with West Palm Beach at $403,887, Boca Raton at $575,479, and Jupiter at $702,538 in between. Rents follow the same pattern, from roughly $2,067 in Greenacres to $2,940 in Boca Raton on the working end of the map, before the island's luxury rents. If you're building a rental portfolio across several of these submarkets rather than one address, our portfolio loan lets you finance them under one facility instead of qualifying each deal separately.

640 is where our DSCR program starts, so under that we point you at a different structure rather than force the file. On the asset-based products (fix and flip, bridge, ground up construction) there is no minimum score at all, and weaker credit is normally offset with lower leverage instead of a decline. There is no hard credit pull to get an answer. A common Palm Beach County path is to buy and stabilize an older unit on a short-term loan, then come back for the DSCR once the file and the rent roll are clean. Subject to underwriting.

Plan on 20% of the purchase, then fund the carry on top of it. DSCR leverage runs up to 80% LTV, so on a $400,000 West Palm Beach purchase that is up to $320,000 from us and $80,000 from you (400,000 x 80% = 320,000). The line people underfund is not the down payment, it is the reserve behind it: Palm Beach County's average homeowners premium including wind ran $6,323 as of March 31, 2026, the highest of any mainland Florida county, and that alone eats more than two months of rent on a $2,400-a-month unit. Get a bound quote on the parcel before we set the ratio. Subject to underwriting.

We write DSCR from $100,000 up to $3,000,000. In a county where June 2026 values run from $210,145 in Pahokee to $2,145,595 in the town of Palm Beach, both ends of that range get used. A working-market door in Greenacres or Boynton Beach sits comfortably inside it; a high-end coastal purchase can run past the $3,000,000 ceiling, and that is a bridge or portfolio conversation instead. DSCR from 0.75 and credit from 640 are the other two gates. Subject to underwriting.