We’re certainly in a time of significant change for where people live and how they work.

During the height of the pandemic, the craziest real estate jumps were in nice rural areas where formerly you either had to be retired, independently wealthy, in an unusual profession that was lucrative in rural areas, or take a pay cut to live.

But as soon as people in tech and many other “traditional business” jobs could keep their high salaries and live in Truckee, or Boise or Coeur d’Alene or Bellingham, quite a number of them moved, and liked what they found.

I’ve lived in places like that for most of my life, so I get it. But I’m not sure how it’s going to shake out.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens over the next few years. The trends/factors I’ve been thinking about are:

* Will they like these areas long term? E.g., Coeur d’Alene is chock-full of natural beauty, but the winters can be a slog. And the politics are wild. In many ways these migrants have brought with them the things they liked from cities, so that smaller rural communities now are likely to have better coffee and nicer restaurants, but they still can’t compete with major metros on a lot of fronts. I anecdotally know one family that migrated from Portland to our community in Idaho during COVID, liked it, but found they missed what the left in the city and are now moving back. I’ll bet they’re part of a trend, even for workers who have the option to stay remote.

* What’s gonna happen with real estate prices in cities? Tremendously high commercial vacancy in cities has yet to cause a crash. But for all the talk about employers forcing people back to work, I think lots of them are going to continue to take advantage of lower rent opportunities. Will that eventually cause a crash or significant dip in overall real estate values in major urban areas? Will that entice more COVID migrants back?

* What about real estate in popular rural areas? I’ve been seeing a lot more price cuts and new listings for homes in our popular COVID migration community in the past few months. Sprig and early summer are traditionally our hot real estate months, and while people are still asking prices they would be laughable a few years ago, they’re not getting those asking prices. Houses are sitting unsold longer, and taking price cuts on the way. I think the sense of “I’ve got to get out of here” is gone, and people aren’t willing to overpay for an “idyllic” rural dream like they were a year or two ago.

* How long will employers who don’t require in-person work have an advantage? I work at a small marketing agency, and I’ve been hiring for a few positions. We can’t always compete with the big agencies for salary, but we offer a better quality of life (anything outside of 9-5 is very rare), and offer very flexible hybrid arrangements (we prefer people in our time zone, and prefer people in our metro who can come to client meetings a couple times a month without getting on a plane, though neither is a hard requirement). The last few months our job openings have gone from “struggling to find qualified applicants” to “struggling to sort through all the qualified applicants because we’ll never have time to interview them all.” At the same time, we have a few clients who require in-person work for positions that could easily be remote, and are open about the fact that they have to pay above market rates to attract talent.

I’m glad I’m not job hunting at the moment, but my sense is that we’re in a time of turmoil, and things will get better for people like the questioner in the article long-term. Not worse.

As an aside, I think the best advice from the article was to work on relevant continuing education. I’m always impressed with candidates who are working to learn new things, particularly if that seems to be coming from a place of sincere curiosity. In my experience, curious people with broad interests tend to be good problem solvers.