06/02/2026
Interesting article by Trevor Frasier. If you have noticed the houses being raise along the coastline, This explains the reasoning and the procedure.
Floridians elevate their homes to reduce hurricane flood risk,
Raising a house off its foundation can cost up to $200 per square foot, but move may pay off in lower insurance costs
Elevating houses requires building them on Jenga-like stacks before adding piers or piles as permanent supports. (Jeremy Patterson/Modern House and Building Movers)
By Trevor Fraser
Key takeaways
• Rising flood risk is driving an increase in home elevations, with about 40% of one Southern mover's work tied to storm recovery.
• Elevating a home is a labor-intensive, highly technical process involving hand-dug tunneling, synchronized jacking systems and deep structural supports.
• Homeowners are incentivized to elevate rather than rebuild by lower insurance premiums and access to state and local programs that can offset high costs.
Jeremy Patterson, president of Modern House & Building Movers in Orlando, is used to his work turning heads, but a house he raised 24 feet off the ground in Largo, Florida, has drawn attention from unexpected places.
“We’ve gotten calls from England about this one,” Patterson told Homes.com News, but “we raise houses every day. We move 3,000-ton hotel buildings, and they don’t get this much publicity.”
Amid all this publicity, the owners wished to remain anonymous.
Between his business in Florida and its sister company, Patterson Shoring in Louisiana, he said, roughly 40% of his work is flood recovery from hurricanes and storms.
“In the last 10 years, it’s been more than ever."
But the process isn’t easy.
“Moving houses is the hardest work,” Patterson said. “You’re throwing 80-pound blocks and jacks all day long. Our employees don’t go to the gym at night.”
They must dig down before they go up
Elevating a house begins with a mystery.
“What we don’t know is what’s underneath the house,” he said. “The only way we can know is to start digging.”
They don’t start with a backhoe or some other big machine. “We literally start tunneling underneath this house by hand,” Patterson said. When they have cleared a little room under the building, they bring in conveyor belts to start carrying the dirt away.
“We’re like little gold miners,” he said.
When there’s a little more room, they bring in the unified jacking system. Think of a bunch of car jacks all operating at the same time, only instead of a lever, there is a hydraulic machine with a series of hoses and pressure gauges.
“My grandfather bought the second unified jacking system in the world,” he said. Patterson claims to own the world’s largest unified jacking system: 124 at once.
Lifting a house requires a unified hydraulic jacking system that operates multiple jacks at once. (Jeremy Patterson/Modern House and Building Movers)
After the house is raised 4 feet off the ground, the workers pour concrete bases and place a series of stacked wooden columns that look like a cross between Jenga and Lincoln Logs beneath the house.
From there, it’s simply a matter of raising the home to the desired level and adding high-pressure piles or piers, long cylindrical columns that are jammed into the ground up to 100 feet deep.
State and local programs offer aid to lift homes
Depending on how high the house has been elevated, the space underneath can be used for parking and storage or simply left empty.
FEMA offers guidelines on raising a home above what’s known as Base Flood Elevation. The agency requires that homes in flood zones that sustain damage valued at more than 50% of the structure's value be either demolished or raised, with some local jurisdictions requiring them to be raised 1 to 2 feet above BFE.
In February 2025, Florida’s Division of Emergency Management launched a program called Elevate Florida that plans to perform mitigation renovations, including home raising, for 2,000 or more eligible homes, covering 75% of the costs. The program received more than 12,000 applications before the portal closed in April 2025, according to the website. The agency is expected to announce the recipients in mid-2026 and complete the renovations by January 2027.
Individual municipalities also offer mitigation programs. Pinellas County, home of Largo, has the Homeowner Rehabilitation/Reconstruction Program, which allows homeowners, depending on their income, to receive up to $375,000 to rebuild or relocate a home.
Doing it oneself can cost between $140 and $200 per square foot, according to Patterson, but he said there is a reason to do it beyond keeping water from the front door.
Homeowners who elevate their houses can also apply for an elevation certificate, which they can present to their insurance company to lower their premiums.
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WRITER
Trevor Fraser
Trevor Fraser is a staff writer for Homes.com with over 20 years of experience in Central Florida. He lives in Orlando with his wife and pets, and holds a master's in urban planning from Rollins College. Trevor is passionate about documenting Orlando's development.
