St. George Island - The Best Beach Value in Florida

Do you really love St. George Island? Do you love the peace of an uncrowded beach? Do you love the fact that there are no high-rises on St. George Island? Do you love that it feels like a you’ve found a secret beach that no one knows about…that only has one “chain restaurant” (i.e. Subway) on the whole island? Well, did you also know that St. George Island can be considered one of, if not the best, beach values in all of Florida?

If you have visited the About Us page of our website, you can probably tell that I (Jonathan) am a numbers guy. I like doing research and proving a point. This week, we’ve set out to prove that St. George Island is the best beach value in Florida when it comes to vacation rental homes.

We used VRBO as our search engine for our quest to prove our point about our favorite beach. We used the following parameters:

· Four bedrooms, 3+ bathrooms

· Private pool

· Beach view

· Pet Friendly (because SGI was a finalist for most pet friendly city in America)

We were VERY liberal in how homes passed the test…as in, we made no judgment calls on whether a house should be included in the list. For example, if VRBO said it had a beach view then we included it…even if it was miles away from the beach.

We searched multiple websites for the best beaches in Florida. We found articles from Coastal Living (like this one) and the Travel Channel that give the top ten beaches in Florida. We also used other websites that listed Florida’s top family friendly beaches. In order to make the list, a location had to have at least five homes that met the criteria above during the week of September 28-October 5. Any other location was simply too small of a sample size. We chose that week because it is a shoulder season period that should allow both north Florida and south Florida to be able to qualify (the high season in Miami is different than the high season on St. George Island).

After looking at all of these articles, we came up with the list of the following beaches:

· Destin

· Panama City Beach

· Cape San Blas

· Captiva Island

· St. Augustine Beach

We compared each of those locations to our home, Sand Dollar – our 4 bedroom, 3.5 bath home in the Plantation with private pool, hot tub and elevator. No, Sand Dollar isn’t the only 4 bedroom home on St. George Island (there are 20 others that meet the criteria), but it is a good representation of the price of St. George Island vacation rental homes. Most of the comparable homes did not have all of the amenities that we have at Sand Dollar, but we included them nonetheless. We also made sure that we were comparing prices properly. We included the all-in price (excluding taxes and VRBO fees) in our comparison. For example, St. George Island is, for the most part, a “fee free” location. Most owners include all of the fees in the cost of the rental price. However, this is not the case for other locations. For example, for one house in Panama City Beach the owner charges $790 in fees (two administrative fees, a cleaning fee and a pet fee)!

So what were the results? St. George Island was the winner! As you can see below, Sand Dollar is significantly lower cost than all of the comparable locations.

Are you still looking for a home for your fall vacation, as we’ve written before, we think the fall is the best time to visit St. George Island. Check us out at St. George Island Beach Vacations. We’d love to host your trip and show you the incredible value that we offer!