More and more urbanites are making permanent moves to towns that were predominately vacation retreats.
The pandemic has boosted demand in places like Colorado’s Vail Valley and Lake Tahoe on the California-Nevada border. It is making for hot competition among homebuyers, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Lake Tahoe’s inventory of unsold homes is down from 421 a year ago to just 60. Bidding wars are driving prices up.
On the Nevada side, the median sale price was up to $1.26 million in July, some 43 percent higher than it was a year earlier. The 157 homes sold in June and July were more than twice as many as sold during the same period last year.
Similarly, on the California side of North Lake Tahoe, the number of sales more than doubled to 532 in those two months, as it did in Vail Valley, to 432, between June 1 and Aug. 20.
Rural areas outside smaller cities are also seeing more activity. Domain Timber Advisors this year has sold 62 lots outside cities including Seattle, Houston and Jacksonville compared with just 25 last year.
“I think the main driver is people really wanting to have the option of getting out of the city and live and exist and enjoying a certain lifestyle,” said managing director Joe Sanderson. [WSJ] — Dennis Lynch