The pandemic led to a huge increase in remote work. There are advantages to remote work, including how it affects your home buying. Why is your remote work tied in any way to your home search? There are actually several ways.
In the 2022 housing market, you have to act fast. The best homes sell within days of going on the market, if not several hours! Buyers are coming to the table with all kinds of offers including all-cash or no contingencies.
To be able to compete, you’ll want some flexibility. If a home goes on the market on a Tuesday night, you want to be able to go check it out on Wednesday morning. If it goes up early Thursday morning, it’d be great if you can be there by noon to take a look.
If you’re working in an office, this is a lot harder to do. Unless the home is very close to your office and your boss is flexible, you’ll need to take some last-minute time off to check out the home – not ideal!
But if you work from home, it’s a different story. You can scoot out to the home, check it out, and be back without any issues.
Obviously, we recommend making sure you don’t miss any important meetings or deadlines by doing this! But the flexibility is great in today’s market.
According to a census.gov report from a few years ago, the average one-way commute time is 27.6 minutes. So when you’re going into the office, you’re spending almost an hour in the car every day.
That’s the average. For a lot of people, 27 minutes would be a dream! They’re driving over an hour each way to get to work.
Remote work flips this on its head. It means you don’t need to do the mental gymnastics on deciding where to live. It’s not the short commute vs. more expensive home discussion that you were having several years ago. There’s now no reason to buy a home close to your work just so you have a shorter commute.
You can live wherever you want! Always wanted to live in a small cabin in the mountains? Go for it – you just need the internet and you’re all set.
Want to move to a condo on the beach? Again, no problem.
Been thinking about moving out of state so you can be closer to your family? This is a great opportunity to do just that.
The shackles are off – remote work allows you to live wherever you want.
This point is tied to the last one, but it’s not quite the same. Buying an affordable home is one thing. Buying a home in the very neighborhood you want is another.
As you probably know, home prices are going up. Some areas are seeing higher growth than others, but they’re going up pretty much everywhere.
This has made it challenging for first-time homebuyers. They want to buy a starter home but it’s tough to do that when the price keeps going up on a monthly basis!
Enter the advantages of remote work! Because you can live anywhere, you can look at less expensive areas than where you were looking previously.
That doesn’t mean you need to move into a “bad” neighborhood. It means you can move to a different part of town that’s further away from where home values tend to be lower.
There are a ton of advantages to working from home – buying a house is one of them! It opens up new doors so you can reach your homeownership goals without having to compromise. If you are ready to take the next steps in buying a home, one of our Art of Homeownership Professionals would love to help you.