| This summer I bought a house in Tahoe (Carnelian Bay) and am now going through some mostly DIY renovations, with a little local contractor help here and there. We also still have a place in San Francisco, but we're spending 70-80% of our time in Tahoe. We spent the whole month of June here, and when we booked our place to stay, Placer county was not allowing short term rentals, so we booked for a full month to get over the threshold. While we were here, restaurants and other things opened back up. About mid-June we started looking at houses. We made one offer for asking price, and got it accepted, right at the end of June. Overall I think we were fairly lucky. There were some stories of places going for substantially over asking price, which is rare for the area. But the largest impact was that housing supply is low, and houses moved really quickly. It's typical for houses in this area to sit on the market for 3-6 months and sell for right around or slightly under asking price. This summer we saw a house go up on Zillow, on Wednesday, and we hemmed and hawed about it until Friday, then told our agent we wanted to tour it. The house was already off the market by that time. We saw plenty of places hit there market, and go into contract within 2-5 days. We looked at several that we're real fixers. Like an 1100 square foot A-Frame that had a terrifying set of disclosures, probably needed at least a down to the studs renovation. All the electrical replaced, plumbing replaced, etc. Everything was DIY, not to code, etc. It sold in a handful of days for at least $500K, and certainly needed another $150K in work. The place we did end up getting, we only got to see because our agent knew the seller and the selling agent. We got to tour it before it hit the multiple listing service and we had an offer in before it actually went on the market. It did hit the MLS for a few hours, but the buyer ended up wanting an easy sale, so accepted or asking price offer. This kind of quick sale is typical for the Bay Area, but not at all for Tahoe. I'm not keeping as close an eye on the market now, but overall asking prices are up, and people are still buying quickly. Also all the local contractors are very busy. The other issue (and we're part of this problem) is that a lot of former rental houses are being put on the market, so locals are having quite a hard time finding a place to rent, and having to end up in places like Reno, which is roughly a 45-60 minute drive away. SFGate has an article about this exact issue here: https://www.sfgate.com/renotahoe/article/Bay-Area-transplant... The other anecdote is that up until a couple of weeks ago it was still quite busy in town. People working at the local grocery store were commenting that it's the busiest shoulder season they've ever seen. Typically this time of year, this place is nearly a ghost town. Both me and my partner have been working remotely since the start of March and expect to continue at least well into next year. Perhaps permanently. |
This has been happening for years, at least around South Lake Tahoe, due to rentals being put up on AirBnB. I've talked to numerous locals over the years while on ski trips and they've all said the same thing: if they're renting it's usually in Nevada and they drive to town every day. During big storms a lot of folks can't even make it to work at all.