The ability for remote workers to move away from offices during the pandemic expedited a white-hot housing market. However, a new analysis by the Economic Innovation Group cites that the remote workers who flocked to the Sun Belt and Southern areas may may also eventually help prices and rents, as these locations are ideal for cheaper housing and construction.
In some ways, the pandemic's housing shifts were a long time coming. Americans have been migrating from expensive coastal cities like New York and San Francisco and industrial towns in the Midwest to the Mountain West and the Sun Belt for years. But with many white-collar workers suddenly untethered from their office desks in bustling downtowns, the shift from densely populated cities to places where housing was cheaper went into overdrive. In places like Phoenix; Boise, Idaho; and Charlotte, North Carolina, rents and home prices exploded. Jay Parsons, the head of economics for the real-estate-software company RealPage, said he believed most of these relocations would have happened eventually. But the pandemic lit a fire under many people to go ahead and make the move.
"These are trends that started well before COVID, but it certainly accelerated that shift," Parsons told [Insider senior reporter James Rodriguez]. "We saw just enormous demand from 2020 to 2021 across the suburbs in general, and in the Sun Belt specifically."
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