Jet activity at Naples Airport mirrors property values

A study by the Naples Airport Authority shows an interesting link between Naples’ growing economy and jet operations at the city’s airport.

Doug DiCarlo, aviation program manager with Environmental Science Associates, told Naples Airport Authority commissioners June 19 that though the two trends do not directly correlate, there’s a connection between the price of real estate and trends in jet activity.

DiCarlo’s June 19 presentation on “Trends in Jet Operations and Local Socioeconomics” measures jet activity from 2019 to June 2024. The study seems to show that when real estate value increased in the city, jet flights increased.

For instance, in 2000, the city’s real estate market was worth $7.13 billion while in that same year, the airport saw 15,452 jet operations. In 2007, Naples’ real estate value rose to $22 billion as the airport’s flights increased to 25,000. When the city’s real estate value fell to $21 billion in 2009, jet operations fell to 18,000. Between 2012 and 2019, the city’s real estate values rose to $30 billion while jet flights increased to 31,000 operations.

When COVID-19 hit in 2020, wealthy travelers eschewed commercial jets and embraced private jet travel, DiCarlo told the commissioner. The move to jet leasing created a spike in jet operations at Naples Airport to 50,000 a year in 2020-21.

“After the COVID pandemic started, there was a significant shift from commercial aviation to private aviation, especially and particularly in markets like here in Naples,” he said.

According to DiCarlo’s chart, Hurricane Ian — which slammed into Southwest Florida on Sept. 28, 2022 — had the opposite effect on market value and jet operations. The value of Naples’ property market shot to $54.6 billion by 2024. At the same time, the airport saw a reduction in jet operations to 46,812 jet operations in 2024.

Again, DiCarlo did not come to concrete conclusions, but said the correlations are interesting points of comparison.

“You see a kind of interesting relationship when the activity jumped up the year of COVID, then leveled off,” he told commissioners. “Property values had a slow start, then went through the roof after Hurricane Ian. That makes a lot of sense when you look at the investment put in redevelopment and reconstruction of many of the properties in the Naples area.”

DiCarlo then introduced a second chart tagged, “Jet Operations vs. Naples Homes Greater than $5 million.” It shows that in 2018, when there were 780 homes worth more than $5 million in Naples, the airport experienced 31,280 flight operations. In 2020, when there were about 800 homes worth more than $5 million, the airport witnessed 50,000 flight operations. The number of $5 million homes, as well as the number of flights, shot up to their 2024 levels: 1,981 homes worth greater than $5 million and 46,218 jet operations.

The increase in jet operations may have something to do with a growing population of wealthy Collier County residents — though the population of Naples has remained just under 20,000 residents since 2010.

One note: 31% of Naples single-family homes have been built or redeveloped since 2010. The Greater Naples Chamber of Commerce has shown that between 2020-21, Collier County gained $4.14 billion in net income.

The study also breaks flight operations down by jet size, with the Dassault Falcon 2000 and other mid-sized business jets making up 73% of jet traffic at the airport between 2000 and 2024. There are fewer large business jets, such as Gulfstream G650s. The older jets of this class are louder and make up fewer and fewer such flights, according to commissioners.

“Generally speaking, the larger the corporate aircraft and the more modern they are, the quieter they are,” airport executive director Chris Rozansky said. “The portion of the fleet operating at Naples that are Stage 3 jets — the oldest, noisiest jets — has dwindled to less than 10 percent of the fleet mix.”

Commissioner Bob Burns, during to the discussion about fewer louder jets, responded to that.

“Statistics don’t mean anything if you live under the flight path or you’re having dinner on Fifth Avenue and a jet takes off and it flies over and it creates 90 decibels of sound,” Burns scolded. “Let’s be realistic and not push the noise issue aside by looking at statistics.”

Commissioner Kerry C. Dustin replied: “I’m well aware of that; I’m one of those that have dinner and I live very close, but the fundamental issue is we don’t control the volume coming in and out of [the airport]. All we can do is understand the trends, and the trends are the jets are getting significantly less noisy.”