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'We're Running Out of Homes For Sale,' Lake Tahoe Brokers Say As Tech Workers Flee Bay Area (cnbc.com) 198

schwit1 shares a report from CNBC: A new wave of urban flight is reshaping real estate markets from New York to Chicago and Los Angeles to San Francisco. As part of this shift, Lake Tahoe is seeing unprecedented bidding wars, buying activity and price increases. Brokers say the inventory of homes for sale has shrunk to about one-fifth to one-tenth of the usual levels. "People are writing all-cash offers for houses, sight unseen," said Sabrina Belleci, a Lake Tahoe broker with Re/Max. "They just want to get out of the city." Historically, properties in the Tahoe area took three to four months to sell, Overall said. Now, it's more like four days.

Lake Tahoe has long been a bucolic escape for Californians looking for a getaway and, on the Nevada side, lower taxes. But the latest buying surge is larger than any the market has seen, brokers say. They say tech workers and investors in the Bay Area, as well as media types from Los Angeles, are coming to the Tahoe area in search of larger homes with home offices, more land for the kids to play, and access to outdoor activities such as swimming and bike riding. The flight from the city got another push this week after Google announced it's keeping workers at home until July 2021. Private schools in the Bay Area also recently announced they will likely shift to all online classes in the fall, which gave families another reason to remain outside of San Francisco.

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'We're Running Out of Homes For Sale,' Lake Tahoe Brokers Say As Tech Workers Flee Bay Area

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  • A couple of things:
    Wow, all cash offers for a house is pretty baller. I don't think the average tech-monkey could swing that.
    Google is doing stay at home for another year. What happens when that year is up? Are these new Tahoe residents going to move back?
    • A couple of things: Wow, all cash offers for a house is pretty baller. I don't think the average tech-monkey could swing that.

      If they were able to get into those markets a while back they may just have enough equity to swing it, but I agree it's not likely the average Google employee is making a 500K and up all cash offer. Tahoe right now is what Palo Alto was in the days of "just list and let the bidding start."

      Google is doing stay at home for another year. What happens when that year is up? Are these new Tahoe residents going to move back?

      I would guess there will still be a lot of flexibility. Tahoe to the city is a about a 4 hour drive, flights around an hour. LA is 8hours but flights are also about 1.5 hours. You could workout a schedule so that you make

    • > Wow, all cash offers for a house is pretty baller. I don't think the average tech-monkey could swing that.

      That's because probably the person offering all cash is not a tech-monkey; that person is a real estate investor who already has rentals and is buying houses like Monopoly houses to turn the property around to rent. Seen it and heard about it from real estate people elsewhere in CA. This is probably the underlying reason housing prices in CA is through the roof and so hard to get in general.
    • "Wow, all cash offers for a house is pretty baller. I don't think the average tech-monkey could swing that."

      Where I'm at (suburban NYC pretty far out,) we're not seeing tech monkeys, or if they are tech monkeys they're full stack DevOps SRE tech bros getting paid $300 or $400K by investment banks or FAANGS. An all-cash offer is no problem if you're cashing in a $2M apartment for a $1M house, or even a $800K one for a $400K house. I guess if things change for these people they can always move back to the cit

    • I guess I'm imagining 3,000+ sq. ft. houses with some kind of Tahoe/Mountain view and a decent amount of land around it, the kind of thing that somebody way up in into six figures would be buying, not just highly paid tech bros.

      The latter might be getting in on this too, but they're probably in an area that's just like any other suburban location and not really so Tahoe.

  • .. . . mind you, last time I visited the Lake Tahoe area, a Commodore 64 and a 300-baud modem was considered cutting-edge tech, but how are the comm amenities out there ? Because a sweet lakeside home with a view is worthless to a techie without sufficient bandwidt isn't going to do the job for long. . .

    • by 1s44c ( 552956 )

      Satellite internet seems to be an option where cable and DSL isn't.

      • It will be when Starlink comes online. Until then, you're stuck with GEO options where the latency is absolute murder. It makes any kind of interactive traffic unreliable. It's fine for downloading, and marginally acceptable for streaming, but it's going to make you the asshole in any video meeting, VOIP, etc.

  • Get out of Dodge........
  • by Impy the Impiuos Imp ( 442658 ) on Friday July 31, 2020 @09:26AM (#60351159) Journal

    "California is too expensive, what with the taxes and all. Wfh is the excuse we need to move to Nevada!"

    [Two months later]

    "It's awesome here! But I think we need to vote for a bullet vacuum train to get us to Las Vegas and back to California for visits, and Tahoe needs a subway, monorail, Monorail, MONORAIL!"

  • by fluffernutter ( 1411889 ) on Friday July 31, 2020 @09:29AM (#60351171)
    I recently lived in the middle of a large city and moved to a place like lake Tahoe, but I paid no more for my house. Both houses cost the same, but I went from 1500 square feet to 3200 and my lot went from 'a little bigger than the house' to 1.5 acres.

    People who work in offices are suckers.
  • In 1918 things were far worse, and yet people came back to cities when it was all over .. even without a vaccine.

    • If more jobs permit telecommuting, then less people will move back to cities.

      But sure, many people will move back to cities when the current crisis is over, assuming it's not immediately followed by another pandemic — which is not entirely unlikely.

      • When the covid death rates are hovering around zero (naturally, or thanks to a treatment/vaccine), it won't take long for everything to open back up again. Especially with telecommuting, people may still want to do city activities. Also, as we saw in the 1918 pandemic (and others) I think covid will bounce around in the rural areas for longer -- in 1918 the pandemic started in the cities and went rural where it did even more damage. I think rural areas and suburbs are where people are more likely to refuse

    • The culture is hugely different now then it was then.
      - The response to the pandemic in 1918 was far more meager than what countries are doing today. You didn't have whole countries shut down endlessly.
      - It sounds morbid, but human life is valued differently now then it was then. Then most families had many children and overall mortality was higher then it is today. Death in general was more "routine" and not as devastating.
      - The world was also in the middle of the Great War, which received a lot more attent

    • All of the manufacturing jobs were in the cities at the time... quite the opposite now.
  • It's already well-documented that if you want less than a 2-hour one way commute to work in the Bay Area, you're paying millions for a house or many thousands a month on rent. I live in suburban NY (about 60 miles from NYC) and we're seeing an increase in interest from city dwellers as well. I live at a point where i -could- do a train commute to the city but I'd be looking at a 3-hour round trip or a rage-inducing expensive-parking drive -- but it's not ideal, so I work locally. Houses within reasonable co

    • Every recruiter I've talked to who has city jobs to offer me has told me that they're going back at least most of the time as soon as this is over. So, how realistic is it for anyone who doesn't work for Google and friends to sell their house and move to the Catskills or something?

      No one knows. The big tech companies are hoping they can make it work, because then they can pay their workers less. Smaller companies are just copying the big ones.

    • The other thing to think about is this -- let's say remote work does catch on, but then bosses have a brilliant flash of an idea and say "Hey, everyone's remote, why not make them really remote and send the work to India? There should be no difference, right?"

      ...only in theory. If offshoring worked, there would be few jobs in the bay area. Tech companies are not hiring Americans out of principle. They're hiring them because they have to. The worker shortage is global. Anyone you want to hire in India is already hired and pretty expensive. So say you can hire 6 Indians for the price of 3 Americans, on ave, 4-5 will quit in the first year....so you're constantly retraining them.

      If they're any good, they will just go to work for Google, MS, etc. The go

  • The beauty of Capitalism is that you never can run out of non-consumed items for sale. You just have to raise the prices.

    Raise them high enough and the people that bought last year will turn around and sell them. Or the people trying to move there will say "Crap, that's too much, let's look somewhere else."

    Either way, you will NOT run out of places to sell.

    • With housing you very well can depending on local zoning laws, rent control, and other restrictions. Capitalism isn't nearly as valuable as a free market (which even incorporates cooperatives and other collectives just as well as individuals) which is something that rarely exists in housing.
  • It will be interesting to see how many people stay through one of our Tahoe winters, it's long and with any luck there will be lots of snow.

    I enjoy the winter a lot but by April/May I'm pretty much done for the year. We still have patches of snow in the high mountains.

    But coming from the mild SF weather to the mountain weather is a pretty big shock to some.

    • For me being an east coaster 90% of the hatred of winter was digging out your car to get to work in the morning. Not a biggie if you telecommute.
    • Who knows how many of these are second homes anyways. How much of the money is coming not from selling out of the valley, but from pulling out of the stock market in anticipation that real estate is the better bet in a recession?
  • by sdinfoserv ( 1793266 ) on Friday July 31, 2020 @11:28AM (#60351611)
    I sold a house North of Seattle in June. 1 day on the market - 9 offers, the highest was $85K over asking price. The offer we took was $45K over asking, no contingencies, no inspection, 30% cash down so the mortgage company waived appraisal as well - 3 week closing.
    Sure, lots of people just say "move away from high prices". High prices go hand in hand with high wages. I moved to the Seattle area from the midwest, wouldn't go back. Aside from choices of things to do - there's pay. If you save 20% of your income no matter where you live, you've go a much larger bank after working years if your making $200K vs $80K.. that's when there's a real payoff, the end game.
  • ... when it comes to housing.

    Point in case: I've by now fully adopted a minimalist lifestyle with all my belongings easily fitting in a 36 square meter single room apartment. I got my kitchen lane in one corner, to large windows out back with quite a bit of green, my 4.5 sqm bathroom and a 2sqm 'hallway'. A neat wide bed for comfy single sleeping or awesome sex with a cute one, a custom-built trolley with my Xboxes and a 27" screen, a small table, a couch table, a couch, my custom built-to-fit bookshelves and stacked storage from muji. .... And I still have to much shit.

    If I had the silicon valley money developers get there I would get myself a micro-home built from some container or something. On a large piece of land with solar and a large garden.

    I fundamentally don't get these large 6-room cardboard boxes filled with stuff you guys usually live in.

    My 2 cents.

    • You don't have kids.

      You don't need a huge house with kids either. However, one day your parents, or your spouse's parents, will come over with a 1 meter tall stuffed animal for your kids. Your kids will immediately fall in love with it, and you will have to move out of your micro-home because of it takes up the entire sitting area.

      I've tried the minimalist lifestyle. They key is to have your extended family buy into the lifestyle as well. Otherwise they will fill your home with junk for you.
  • by rndmtim ( 664101 ) <rndmtim@yahoo.cTWAINom minus author> on Friday July 31, 2020 @12:22PM (#60351795)

    Well, speaking as someone originally from NYC - born and raised - who moved to upstate Schoharie County 10 years ago (for the space and nature, but definitely not for the neighbors), a couple of points.

    1) Most people leaving SF or NYC right now are just looking for a back yard. My sister just migrated from Woodside Queens to be with her boyfriend in Boulder, and it's based on a tiny apartment was tolerable when you could go out a lot. My friends from Brooklyn moved to my area so a neighbor couldn't call in a noise complaint on the bouncy house they set up to give their kids something to do. Having nothing social other than a pancake breakfast at the fire house was a show stopper before, but the city has nothing to offer right now, and that's probably not going to stay the case 1-2 years from now. The speed bump the cities are currently having is not a decline. The decimation our rural areas have gone through for the last 3 decades is.

    2) Techies who move from the urban core (I'm an electrical engineer) usually are making multiples of the local median salary. The local towns in most cases are lucky to have us. We generally need nothing from the local community, and I live in an area with significant social problems - the biggest drug issues in the country are in the hollers of the mountains where people got hooked on oxy. We have homeless families living in cars next to fields with cows here. We have programs to send kids home over the weekend with peanut butter and bread because they will not be fed otherwise. We let kids shower at schools because they live in structures with no plumbing.

    3) The Republicans in my area don't want the people making multiples of the local salary, even though it would re-ignite a tax base decimated by their own children abandoning the area, because... reasons. It gets really complex figuring out why they don't want people who only need a broadband connection and pay taxes on properties that were basically abandoned, but it's usually that they don't want the local population to change. And when this county has 30,000 inhabitants 180 miles from NYC it's one article in the lifestyle section of the NY Times from getting 5-10,000 new voters. But stick a fork in 'em it's done now, particularly with two home families that can do mail in voting.

    4) Their kids left the area because there are no jobs. But companies don't want to locate here because the employment environment is terrible. Locals are unreliable employees - waiters show up for 2 weeks and then vanish. The education level sucks (because the locals really like sports but math and science not so much), and there are a lot of social problems (my wife is a school librarian and there are social/family problems here I never saw in NYC). One of the problems is local rural healthcare can't keep doctors easily; our pediatrician recently departed because she got a little tired of the casual racism the locals exhibit towards anyone who isn't white.

    5) As ex-city people populate an area, the change in tax base and social programs mostly benefits the people originally from the area, even as they tend to hate us. The Hudson Valley's massive growth in the last 20 years means that rural Greene County is now getting better schools from the new tax base. It also means that there's been a renewed focus on environmental protection, as well as tourism to these green spaces.

    6) Every abandoned house on my mountain seems to have sold in the last 4 months, and we just moved a farm property with 125 aces in 6 weeks after the pandemic started that we expected to take 2 years to sell (it had been on the market since last July). But the new imports from the city haven't been through a winter yet... and when they find out about snow blowers and studded snow tires and snow that keeps going until... well this year it was Mother's Day... they may leave the area just as quickly once the pandemic dies down.

  • by edi_guy ( 2225738 ) on Friday July 31, 2020 @12:38PM (#60351891)

    If Tahoe gets a winter like 2018-19 will be interesting for these folks. Not sure that a Tesla Model 3 is going to cut it, and once your internet is out...wfh becomes more challenging.

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