How to Increase the Value of Wetlands

Even people in the real estate community will warn you off property with wetlands as part of the purchase — the problem is that warning is really just the construction industry's negative view, repeated secondhand. Years ago, when people looked at land purely for development, wetland acreage was quickly eliminated from consideration. Others ended up buying land with undisclosed wetlands and finding out only after closing that they couldn't build on it, often after overpaying by a wide margin.

That's less likely to happen today — wetland locations are fully mapped, and a buyer who does proper due diligence, including a wetland delineation, will easily uncover their presence before closing. Not being able to build on the wetland portion, and unintentionally buying wetlands sight-unseen, are the two real reasons behind the reputation. Small builders also tend not to want the hassle of wetland regulations or a workaround, and agents who think purely in terms of buildable lots end up perpetuating the negative framing instead of the actual benefits.

Most people will have an opinion about your real estate purchase, usually well-intentioned, but they don't necessarily understand what you actually want for yourself. You're the one buying, so keep that in mind as you hear the warnings — you could end up missing your ideal property chasing someone else's preference instead. If you're not planning to develop or build a house on the wetland portion (including its buffer zone), buying property with a wetland component can be a genuine opportunity rather than a liability.

In most cases you can improve the usability of your wetlands, and improved usability increases the value of the acreage. With approval from the agency in charge in your county (for example, the Environmental Protection Commission in Hillsborough County), you can apply to cut trails, install boardwalks where useful, add bridges (simple or high-end), build decks over water or scenic areas, and add environmentally friendly structures like a gazebo or yurt. Approval is required — don't start any of this before you have it in hand.

Marketing wetland property should look different than marketing a cookie-cutter house. Some of the same channels apply, but a wetland property needs additional marketing approaches beyond what works for a standard resale home in order to sell for top dollar.

EPA rules, and the rules of the agencies that report to it, aren't designed to stop private landowners from enjoying the wetland portion of their property — they exist to make sure wetlands aren't degraded and their ecological benefits aren't destroyed.

To improve your wetland property, you'll need approval from the local agency in charge — in Hillsborough County, for example, that's the Environmental Protection Commission. Most other counties have their own equivalent department. If you're not sure which agency covers your area, the Water Management Districts' website is the place to find local contacts; where a county doesn't have a dedicated office, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection handles it at the state level.

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) · Florida Department of Environmental Protection — Water Policy

When a large developer wants to build on land that includes a wetland component, they can buy mitigation credits to offset the impact. Under Florida's Uniform Mitigation Assessment Method (UMAM), a credit represents the ecological equivalent of one acre of wetland restored from no function to optimal function — it is not automatically equal to one physical acre of land. Because credits are scored on functional quality, offsetting one acre of impact commonly requires several acres of mitigation land, not a straight 1:1 swap. If a developer can instead design a workaround for the wetland portion of a project, that route often costs less than buying credits, but the presence of wetlands generally doesn't stop development outright; it changes how the project is structured.

A mitigation credit bank is the wetland site itself, restored or improved by whoever owns the property and has the financial resources to do it — both privately and publicly owned banks exist. Multiple government agencies are involved in the approval process, and credits are tracked through a ledger system maintained by the agency that issued them.

If you're developing land with a wetland component, you (the permittee) may be able to buy mitigation credits to offset the impact your development will cause. That's a conversation worth having with a broker familiar with wetland transactions before you commit to a site plan.

Florida's wetland loss tracks its population growth closely — and the largest losses happened before anyone fully understood what wetlands were worth ecologically.

Metric	Earlier	More recent
Florida population	1,613,000 (1935)	22,000,000 (2020, projected)
Florida wetland acreage	20,300,000 acres (1830)	10,100,000 acres (2020)

Since that early period, the pace of wetland loss has slowed tremendously as the value of wetlands has become better understood — it's plausible the trend eventually reverses and some lost wetland acreage is regained over time.

Before canals were dug, dikes built, and millions of wetland acres filled, the natural flow of water through Florida's wetlands cleaned pollutants out of rainwater and other sources. That natural flow has changed to accommodate the state's growth, and many restored wetlands no longer function quite the way they originally did. Restored or newly created wetlands are better than no fix at all, but they typically don't perform as well — including for wildlife diversity — as the original, undisturbed wetland.

The red tide that hits Florida's West Coast most years traces back in part to the roughly 50% loss of the Everglades' natural water flow, along with the rerouting of water east and west of Lake Okeechobee to accommodate sugar cane farming and roads that block the original flow path.