Start here.
Florida voted on Amendment 3 this week. It passed.
The measure caps assessment-value increases on homesteaded primary residences at 5 percent, down from 10 percent. The stated purpose is homeowner relief.
Here is the part the ballot language does not say. The revenue the state loses from cutting homeowner taxes does not disappear. It gets recovered from other property classes. Commercial real estate. Investment properties. Multifamily buildings. Single-family rentals.
The math the ballot did not print
The projected revenue shortfall is $4.6 billion in 2027 and $8.4 billion in 2028. Local governments need that money to operate.
The independent Tax Foundation analysis projects the non-homestead impact:
- Multifamily apartment buildings: plus roughly 15 percent on property taxes. Per unit, that is about $406.
- Single-family rentals: plus $1,000 or more per property annually.
- Miami-Dade County specifically: plus roughly $291 per rental unit per year.
These are not worst-case numbers. These are the modeled estimates from the independent analysis. The actual impact depends on how each county adjusts its millage rate. But the mechanism is settled: when one class pays less, the other classes pay more.
The mechanism, named
Amendment 3 is a class-based tax shift. It uses the property-tax code to transfer tax burden from one group of property owners (homesteaded homeowners) to another group (commercial and investment property owners, including multifamily landlords).
This is not a new idea. The NYU Furman Center documented the same mechanism in New York City. Large multifamily buildings in NYC pay a disproportionate share of the property-tax levy relative to their value. Per-unit tax obligations rose faster than inflation between 2019 and 2025 even as real net operating income declined.
Florida’s Amendment 3 is the same mechanism. The difference is it happened overnight — by ballot measure, not by decades of policy drift.
Where storage sits in this system
A self-storage facility pays property taxes. The two silent killers are taxes and insurance, and every storage operator knows the first call before closing is to the county assessor.
But the storage operator sits in a different part of the tax code than the multifamily landlord.
Storage is commercial property. Its tax treatment changes when the county adjusts its commercial millage rate. Multifamily is caught between the residential and commercial classifications — treated as commercial for tax purposes but regulated as residential for policy purposes. Storage does not carry that split classification risk.
There is a more important structural difference. A storage operator can raise rates to cover a tax increase. The rate increase is a business decision constrained by the market. A multifamily landlord in a city with rent control cannot always pass a property tax increase through to rent. The rent ceiling is set by ordinance. The tax bill is set by the county. When the two diverge, the landlord absorbs the difference.
Run the numbers on the class shift
Take a 20-unit apartment building in Miami-Dade. The projected increase is about $5,820 per year at $291 per unit. If the owner cannot pass it through because of local rental ordinances, that $5,820 comes out of the NOI. Capitalized at a 6 percent cap rate, that is roughly $97,000 in lost value.
A storage facility in the same county — 20,000 square feet, 150 units, stabilized at 90 percent occupancy — has no rent ceiling from the county. Its tax increase, when the commercial rate adjusts, goes into the rate structure as a modeled cost. The operator decides when and how to pass it through. Not the city.
The fair point
Storage is not immune to property taxes. The county assessor can raise the valuation on a storage facility every year. The two silent killers are real here too. But the difference is who controls the pass-through. In storage, it is the operator. In multifamily, it is the city council.
Same investor, different vehicle. Run the numbers.
Past performance is not indicative of future results. Figures in these posts are historical results for those specific deals or the cited industry data, not projections, and nothing here constitutes investment advice. The math that decides a deal is the math you do before you sign — underwrite it yourself, or have someone you trust walk it with you.