Those searching for affordability farther out are finding plenty of competition. In New York’s Dutchess and Putnam counties, typically weekend-home areas that don’t lend themselves to daily commutes to the city, prices are setting records. So is the swiftness of deals—about two months from listing to contract.
Home shoppers are also flocking to the more-rural Catskills region, said Joseph Satto, founder of brokerage Fresh Air Realty.
“These buyers have reallocated their resources,” said Satto, who often meets potential clients in Brooklyn, where he also lives part-time. “They say ‘I was going to spend X amount on a place in the city and get a small country place, but now I’m flipping the script—I’m going to get a nicer place in the country.’”
A typical plan being mapped out by some of his urban-based clients is to spend at least Friday through Monday working and living in the Catskills, while spending midweek in the city, sometimes in an apartment shared with others, he said.
In New Jersey, heated demand is set to push home values up 12% this year, and an additional 3% in 2022, according to a projection by appraisal firm Otteau Valuation Group. Contracts in close-to-the-city Bergen County jumped 16% this year through July, compared with the same period in 2020. In farther-out Middlesex and Somerset Counties, deals were up more than 20%.
Much of the demand from urban buyers is “nowhere near a train line,” according to Jeffrey Otteau, the firm’s president.
“No one knows the answer to how far back the pendulum is going to swing” on return-to-office plans, he said. “Employers are tiptoeing on this right now.”
A strong labor market is also upping the swagger of those who are buying houses without clear guidance on their employer’s return policy—many of which are still shifting as virus caseloads creep up again with the highly contagious delta variant.
In a spring survey by career site FlexJobs.com, 58% of respondents said they would “absolutely” look for a new job if they couldn’t continue working from home. Many people paying for access to the site’s employment listings signed up recently, after their current bosses rebuffed their requests to continue remote work, said Brie Reynolds, career development manager at FlexJobs.
Even if employers “make a policy now and say, ‘All right, you’re coming back in September,’ is that really going to happen? No one knows,” said Wile, the Redfin agent in Westchester. “The confidence of people knowing that they’ll find another job—I’ve never seen anything like this.”
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.