A Woman Became a TikTok Star by Mocking Florida’s Absurd Home Prices

• Menephta Fernandez, 38, makes videos poking fun at rundown Florida homes with high price tags.
• She’s racked up 27,000 followers on Instagram and 17,000 on TikTok since last summer.
• She said that people who feel Florida’s unaffordability deeply turn to her videos to feel seen.

Last summer, when Menephta Fernandez, a mom of three, was looking to buy a house in her hometown of Miami, she juggled another daunting task.

“I am the supposed cool mom,” she said. “So I decided I needed to learn how to use TikTok.”

Somewhere between combing Zillow listings and her discovery of TikTok’s green-screen feature, which allows you to superimpose your talking head on top of a background image, Fernandez was inspired to use her new account, @menephtaf. On October 1, she decided to offer outsiders a glimpse into the absurdity of the South Florida real-estate market.

Her first real-estate video, mocking a $1.3 million house with a garish dolphin statue out front and a stone performance stage, was a hit: 16,500 people viewed it.

“It went viral,” Fernandez told Insider. “Everyone was crying with laughter.”

She continued to post similar videos a few times a week, and they made her a local star: She racked up 27,000 followers on Instagram and 17,000 on TikTok; began to collaborate with other comedians who found fame through social media; and scored a contract with the satirical Instagram account “Only in Dade,” which is named after of the county Miami is in and has a following of over 900,000.

On a deeper level, her videos provide a bit of comic relief for those who, like Fernandez, feel defeated by the South Florida housing market.

With sale prices of homes in Miami up 58% since the beginning of 2020 — not to mention the prices in Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach, which are up 67% and 83%, respectively — Fernandez’s relatable humor has bonded together Floridians lamenting shabby selections and high prices in what seems for many to be a futile search to own a home.

Fernandez faced some backlash over her videos

In 2021, Fernandez and her husband were renting and determined to buy a home for their family.

“I worked really hard on getting our credit to a good place, as well as saving hard-earned money to put down on a house,” said Fernandez, who works as a makeup artist.

But the houses on the market were priced far above what she believed they were worth, she said.

Her videos spotlight the types of homes she saw when scrolling on Zillow: a home in shambles in the Little Haiti neighborhood of Miami listed for $400,000, with the note “renovate for endless potential”; one in Hialeah, just outside Miami, priced at $492,000, with a hole in the roof that “needs attention”; a 200-square-foot studio converted from a backyard shack in Hollywood, Florida, listed at $494,000, where the seller specified that “this is NOT a shed.”

After searching through many listings like these, Fernandez said, she was resigned to putting her dream of homeownership on hold.

“I cried. I laughed,” she said — and she took to the green screen to vent.

She said she’s also gotten pushback over some of her commentary. In one instance, a house she mocked turned out to be a home that had burned down. Fernandez said she received cruel comments in her direct messages, but that she still believes the point she’s making is valid.

“So it’s okay to overprice people?” she asked. Fernandez doesn’t think so. She doesn’t hold back, she said, and that’s what her followers like about her.

Miami is so unaffordable that it pushed Fernandez to move to Tampa

Even renting was hard in Miami in 2021. Fernandez said she bid on rental homes for four months to no avail. So she and her family moved to Tampa, where the cost of buying a home is generally lower than on the eastern coast.

They’ve now decided the move will be permanent.

Fernandez isn’t the only South Floridian to do this. Many Miamians who can no longer afford the cost of living in the Magic City have moved to Tampa, the Tampa Bay Times reported.