I don’t believe this will last. AirBnBs are crashing in non-tourist towns because people don’t have money. I firmly believe the remote revolution will push people out from cities and build up small towns so that work that has to be done in a physical location can thrive too. Small towns have the opposite problem of city centers where they have too much housing.
I picked up a house in one of these areas. It was I’m the 3rd ring of a metro and thus too rural for most. I bought right when the first Starbucks got finished and now they have expensive “luxury” apartments like crazy. I’m pleading with my sister to take a house one more ring out because she has a chance to get a house before they’re too expensive. I got my house for 200K, but it’s worth over double that and it’s only been 2 years crazy.
To say I’m within an hour’s drive of a big city I rarely go’s because this city was a small town first not a suburb, so it has all you need really and they build responsibility knowing that most of the population has no taste for going more than the next small town over.
I feel like movement back to these small towns is the future. The internet will let us keep jobs there.
It’s hard. I took out a loan against my 401K to do it when rates were rock bottom. I’m glad I did because at the time I considered just waiting until the pandemic was over, but that would have priced me put of this town if I did that.