by Wolf Richter
Wolf Street
Work-from-anywhere, unemployment crisis, oil bust, people chasing a cheaper less crowded place to live, the land rush to buy homes.
There was even a story on NPR: People from big, densely populated, expensive cities showing up in small towns in beautiful rural areas for a few weeks to get away and then getting stuck, now that they can work remotely, and buying homes and sending their kids to local schools. These are just stories, and there are now millions of them. But it’s showing up in asking rents in those big expensive markets, where vacancies are rising and landlords have to compete with each other to fill their units, and tenants are moving within the city in order to get a nicer place for less money – the free upgrade they’ve been waiting for, after years of costly downgrades.