A new restaurant opened at the city marina this past August. Ralphie's Fish Camp seats just over 150 people on Marina Drive, with an oyster bar, a stage for live music, and a program that lets anglers bring in their own catch to be cooked to order. The owner, Grant Rish, is a sixth-generation Port St. Joe native. He told Business Debut the goal was simple: guests should be able to walk in "with their sandy toes and a cover up and not have to worry about going back home to get ready."
That kind of local pedigree matters here, because Port St. Joe's real estate market carries a corporate pedigree of its own, and it shows up in the numbers in a way most median-price headlines miss entirely.
One Company, Two Very Different Products
The St. Joe Company that operates today under the ticker JOE is not new to this town. It started as St. Joe Paper Company in 1936 and opened a mill on St. Joseph Bay in 1938. For sixty years, that mill was the reason Port St. Joe existed as a working town rather than a fishing camp. When it closed in the late 1990s, the effect was not gradual. The town lost jobs, lost residents, and spent years figuring out what came next.
What came next was the same company, wearing a different hat. In 2001, The St. Joe Company began developing WindMark Beach on 2,020 acres just west of downtown, a master-planned resort community built around boardwalks, a Village Center, and architecture styled after 1930s Old Florida cottages. The company did not just build houses there. The State of Florida rerouted US 98 further inland specifically to free up the beachfront acreage that became WindMark, a decision that quietly drew a line between two markets that now sit inside the same zip code.
A rough timeline of that shift:
- 1938: St. Joe Paper Company opens its mill on St. Joseph Bay
- Late 1990s: the mill closes, and the town's population and job base shrink
- 2001: The St. Joe Company begins platting WindMark Beach on land freed up by the US 98 reroute
- 2018: D.R. Horton buys 64 lots inside WindMark and starts production-building homes there
- August 2026: Ralphie's Fish Camp opens at the city marina, three miles from WindMark's Village Center
That last line is not a footnote. It shows the same push and pull still playing out, a local family opening a restaurant downtown while a national homebuilder keeps filling in lots a few minutes away.
What That History Still Prices Into the Market
Here is where it gets useful for anyone actually comparing Port St. Joe to other stops on the Forgotten Coast. In the three months ending June 2026, the median sale price in Port St. Joe was $440,000, up 2.3 percent from the same period a year earlier. Homes sold that period took a median of 118 days to close, compared with 90 days the year before. Sixty-two homes sold in June 2026, up from 53 the year prior.
At the same time, the town's broader average home value, as tracked in July 2026, sat at $469,759, down 3.4 percent over the previous twelve months.
A median climbing while an average falls is not a contradiction. It is a signal. It means the homes that are actually closing right now skew toward one end of the market, likely the move-in-ready product coming out of WindMark, while a wider pool of listings across the rest of town, including older in-town housing stock, is sitting longer and pulling the average down. The median tells you what is selling. The average tells you what is sitting. In a town built on two different housing products from two different eras of the same company's history, that gap is exactly what you would expect.
Same Zip Code, Different Products
Drive three miles from Reid Avenue to WindMark's Village Center and you cross from one housing product into another. Downtown, the stock is mostly older cottages and bungalows built for millworkers and their families, many of them renovated over the past two decades as the paper smell that locals used to call "bread and butter" faded from memory. At WindMark, the stock is newer, platted to a design code, and anchored by a commercial center with tenants like The View on the bay, Bruno's Pizza, and R&R Outfitters running beach and water rentals.
Both are legitimately Port St. Joe. Neither is a stand-in for the other. A buyer pricing a downtown cottage against a WindMark listing and expecting the numbers to behave the same way is comparing two different products that happen to share a mailing address, one shaped by a company that used to run a mill and the other by the same company after it reinvented itself as a resort developer.
The Road That Moved Still Shapes Who Sees What
The US 98 reroute is easy to miss on a map and hard to miss once you understand what it did. Before WindMark existed, the highway ran closer to the water. Moving it inland gave the company a clean strip of beachfront to develop on its own terms, separate from the through-traffic corridor that still runs past Reid Avenue's shops and restaurants.
Practically, that means a "waterfront" search in Port St. Joe can turn up two very different experiences: a platted, amenity-heavy community set back from the old highway, or an older bayfront or canal lot inside the original town grid, closer to the marina and the daily rhythm of a working waterfront. Neither is better. But they answer different questions, and a buyer who does not ask which one they are looking at can end up disappointed by a commute, a lot size, or an HOA structure they did not expect.
Reading This Against the Rest of the Forgotten Coast
Every coastal town on this stretch of the Panhandle has some version of a split market. What makes Port St. Joe's split worth understanding on its own terms is how traceable it is. You are not guessing at an invisible mix of buyer types. You can point to one company, one mill closure, one rezoned highway, and one resort community, and follow the line from there straight to today's median-versus-average gap.
The town has kept adding to that story since. Sacred Heart Hospital on the Gulf opened in 2010. Eastern Shipbuilding opened a facility in 2021, putting the town's deep-water port back to work in a different form than the old mill ever used it. None of that guarantees future price direction. It does mean the reinvention that started with WindMark in 2001 has kept going in ways that are not limited to real estate, which is part of why the town supports both a legacy downtown and a newer resort corridor without either one crowding the other out.
A Few Common Questions
Is WindMark Beach its own town, or part of Port St. Joe? WindMark Beach sits within Port St. Joe's broader real estate market, a few miles from the historic downtown along Reid Avenue. It is not a separately incorporated town, but it functions as its own distinct community with its own amenities and design guidelines.
Why does the median price look different from the average home value? The median reflects the midpoint of homes that actually closed in a given window, while the average reflects the estimated value across the full stock of homes in town. When one segment of the market is moving briskly and another is sitting, the two figures can move in opposite directions, which is what has been happening in Port St. Joe through mid-2026.
Does the US 98 reroute still affect property today? Yes, indirectly. It shaped where the beachfront resort community sits relative to the older highway corridor through downtown, which still influences drive times, visibility, and the general feel of a listing depending on which side of that line it falls on.
If you are weighing Port St. Joe against another stop on the Forgotten Coast, the median price alone will not tell you which version of the town you are actually pricing. First & Main Real Estate Group works across Gulf County and the surrounding coast and can walk you through what a specific listing is actually offering, whether that is a renovated cottage near Reid Avenue or a newer build inside WindMark. Start Your Property Search when you are ready to see how the numbers break down for the kind of home you actually want.
