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In early spring, Arthur Chinn and Tom Richardson sit in their backyard in the Fairgrounds neighborhood of Sacramento, sipping tea and eating home-baked snickerdoodle cookies. Chinn is an architect and designer, Richardson a retired credit union employee.

Their cream-colored, stucco four-bedroom, three-bathroom home on a newly developed cul-de-sac, purchased for $569,000 just before the onset of the pandemic, is large (2,100 square feet), its ceilings high, its walls tastefully decorated with art. On the L-turn of the staircase, small model houses line a mantelpiece; below them, on one of the carpeted stairs sits a pottery dog.

The area they chose to move into to spend their retirement years—after selling their mid-sized condo in the Bay Area city of Hayward for $780,000—is a low-key neighborhood, tucked south of Tahoe Park and a stone’s throw from UC Davis Medical Center. The Broadway locale of Bacon Butter is just a few minutes’ walk away. “We decided we were going to leave the Bay Area,” Richardson explains, referencing the high cost of living, the congestion and the endless traffic jams. “But where do we go? We’re not going to leave California and not going south of San Luis Obispo. Sacramento was the only place that had what we were looking for.” The state capital was a city where they already had friends—some architects and artists and designers, an ER nurse and a few others. It would, Richardson felt, be an easy move.

Chinn agrees. He has spent the pandemic months cycling around Sacramento, looking for new eateries—takeout at first, now, post-vaccination, eat-in—and generally familiarizing himself with the lay of the land in their new home. He talks with enthusiasm about “the wonderful restaurants,” the dim sum joints, the hole-in-the-wall delis that he discovered before the pandemic shut everything down, and how he’s looking forward to more culinary revelations as the economy is opening back up again. When he was a child, growing up in Oregon, his family used to bring him to Sacramento to visit an old family friend: Frank Fat. He used to eat in Fat’s iconic restaurant. Now, more than half a century later, Sacramento’s cuisine still draws him in. “To me, it has the Old World flavor,” he says. Chinn also likes the fact that he and Richardson have a garden and can get The Sacramento Bee delivered to their doorstep early each morning. “Everything is simpler here,” he says.

Chinn and Richardson are part of a Bay Area influx into Sacramento and the surrounding suburbs that throughout the past couple years—and especially during the pandemic—has added rocket fuel to the area’s real estate market, and has begun pricing longtime Sacramentans out of the region. Realtor.com estimates that the median asking price of a home in the city of Sacramento is now $395,000, and the median sales price is $400,000—up more than 12% over last year. For Sacramento County, the median sales price is now $445,000. UPDATE The site predicts that the Sacramento region will be the single hottest real estate market in California in 2021. Houses go on the market and within hours the sellers receive multiple offers, many of them waiving contingencies and appraisals, frequently with buyers coming out of the Bay Area real estate market flush with dollars and willing to pay cash for their Sacramento purchases. (Median home price in March for the San Francisco Bay Area was $1.2 million.)

“There’s a low inventory right now,” says real estate agent Ann Fraire of Reynen Bardis Homes. “And the few homes there are getting snapped up by Bay Area buyers.” It’s a similar story to that which unfolded in earlier years in coastal towns north and south of San Francisco, a story of real estate mania and local displacement.

Luis Sumpter of Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate says this mirrors a national trend. Nationwide, in January, he says (quoting data generated by Sacramento-based real estate analyst Ryan Lundquist) there were about 346,000 homes on the market; that compares to anywhere from 700,000 to a million in an average January. California alone is about 3 million homes shy of where it needs to be to easily and affordably house its residents. Now, says Sumpter, an exodus from the Bay Area into the Sacramento region—fueled by the shift to remote work and the desire for more space, especially for gardens for children stuck at home—is making the local crunch even worse. “Mostly, they’re buying in the suburbs,” he says, citing Elk Grove as a particularly hot location. “(There’s) also some influx into the Central City—Tahoe Park, North Oak Park. There’s crazy business in Roseville from Bay Area transplants. The foothills as well. Oh, my gosh. It’s really affecting our whole region.”

In Citrus Heights, Cindy Tran of eXp Realty has found in recent months as interest rates have stayed low and paperwork needed to purchase loans has lightened up (pandemic response by the banks), most of her clients are coming from the Bay Area. Some have cashed out on property there, but many others are first-time buyers priced out of the San Francisco-area market who have realized during the pandemic that they can live in other cities and still maintain their Bay Area networks and employment. Some of these buyers are young; others are older, including first generation immigrants, nearing retirement, who can’t afford to purchase a home in the Bay Area and are scared that without some real estate to call their own they risk destitution in old age.

“My family originally came from the Philippines,” says one recent arrival in Sacramento who didn’t wish to publish his name. “My wife came to San Francisco first, in 1998. I followed her with my daughter in 2001. I’ve been in San Francisco since.”

Even though he has a graduate degree in agronomy from UC Davis and now works for a biotech company in Berkeley and his wife is a high school chemistry teacher, they’ve been unable to save enough to buy into the Bay Area’s inflated housing market. Meanwhile, their daughter, who works in the tech industry, and her fiancé bought a WHAT SIZE house in Alameda County that cost $1.4 million, far beyond anything her parents could ever dream of buying.

As retirement neared, the couple—he’s in his late 50s; she’s a couple years younger—realized they would never live in anything larger than a two-bedroom rental apartment if they stayed in San Francisco, and that even that would cost them a minimum of $3,000 a month. They began looking elsewhere: Modesto, Vallejo, Vacaville, San Jose and eventually Sacramento. “We made up our minds. We’re not going back to the Philippines to retire,” he says. “The property we bought is 2 miles from a high-crime area, but we’re ready for the challenge. It’s in North Sacramento. We moved in Feb. 5. The house is nice. We’re enjoying it.” Their SIZE, COST home came with a garden, and the couple are growing vegetables and cherry and lemon trees.

“I think we made the right decision,” he says. “So far, we’re happy. There’s more time to relax. We buy stuff for our garden. Now I have some form of exercise, instead of just watching TV.”

“Mid-year 2020, I started getting a lot of calls. The majority of my clients are aiming for areas that are up and running, being developed,” Tran explains of the influx from points west. People are looking for large houses in Elk Grove, Natomas, Roseville, Lincoln and Rocklin.” It’s not unusual for them to pay up to $50,000 over the asking price. “There is one deal I just closed. The property listed at $439,999. We went into contract at $475,000.”

As far afield as the foothills, real estate agents are seeing this influx. “They’re moving here for the serenity of the area, the excellence of the schools, more space around them and privacy,” says Patricia Seide, who sells homes in exclusive developments in El Dorado Hills—such as Serrano, with its country club and golf course, and where a plethora of local amenities (shopping, farmers markets, summer concert series) are nearby. During the pandemic, Seide says, generations of families that had been dispersed throughout Northern California decided proximity to family trumped ZIP code. “As soon as COVID happened,” she says, “we started getting calls from people to look at homes. If the kids are here, the parents are coming; and if the parents are here, the kids come. The prices in a year just kept going up. Where something was $800 or $900,000, now it’s $1.3 or $1.4 million.”

For 31-year-old Elena MacDonald and 36-year-old Abraham Paul, moving to Sacramento from Sonoma with their infant son, Liam, was a way to break into a housing market that had priced them out in the Bay Area. MacDonald is a teacher and Paul, originally from the Caribbean island of Dominica, is a manager at a Vacaville branch of Lowe’s.

“We were living in Sonoma County, where I grew up, in Rohnert Park,” says MacDonald. “We had been toying with the idea of moving out to Sacramento for the last couple of years, because pricing is more reasonable and we knew our buying power would be greater here. I’d gone to Sacramento State a decade ago; that’s what drew us to Sacramento.”

When the pandemic hit, they approached Sumpter to be their real estate agent and began scouting for homes in town. They looked at upward of 20 properties. Not wanting to come more times than necessary during the pandemic, they bundled their searches, making appointments to see five or more homes each time they drove to Sacramento. Time after time, the homes either went before they could put in a bid or they would offer $10,000 over the asking price only to find a slew of other bidders had offered even more. Eventually, however, they found one within their budget in Arden Manor, on a quiet tree-lined road of bungalows just down the street from Crabtree Park. They put down an offer of $325,000—asking price—on a three-bedroom, one-bathroom 1,300-square-foot house, and to their delight the seller accepted.

It’s modest house with a blue front door and a front yard with grass speckled with dandelions and daffodils beside a driveway big enough to park their Hyundai sedan and their purple Toyota minivan. The back wall of their living room is open brick, the floors hardwood. Paul has to commute daily to Vacaville, but MacDonald, who is an assistant teacher at an online school, can work out of one of the bedrooms. On her lunch breaks, she bundles Liam into his large black stroller and walks to the park. There are slides and climbing structures in the center of the park beside the tennis courts, surrounded by ornamental pear trees.

“For me, it’s the peace,” says Paul, explaining why he enjoys his new neighborhood. “I like quiet. Definitely an environment I want my son to grow up in, to make friends. The neighbors are super friendly.”

Real estate agent Tammy Hall of Reynen Bardis Homes has found that during the pandemic homes in the suburbs and gated communities surrounding Sacramento have been selling extraordinarily fast, the red-hot market stimulated by ever-growing numbers of Bay Area emigres.

Driving a large white Lexus, its interior a lush tan leather, her large sunroof open to catch the sun and wind, Hall barrels out to the Serrano development, a gated community in El Dorado Hills. Even on the more cookie-cutter streets of this development, homes near the golf course are selling for far north of $1 million. In the more exclusive hilltop heights of the community, individually designed mansions, some exceeding 5,000 square feet, sell for many times that.

She drives down one street and ticks off a list of buyers and where they came from. San Jose. San Francisco. Redwood City. Santa Rosa. At least half of the recent buyers are from the Greater Bay Area. “The amount of people wanting to come in from the Bay was crazy,” she said of the early days of the pandemic. “It was up even before that; but the pandemic is accelerating it all even more. These homes just get gobbled up.”

One of Hall’s clients is Paul Sembrano. He and his wife, Hoa, their 8-year-old son, Jeremiah, and 7-year-old daughter, Kailee—decided late last year to move from Hoa’s parents’ house in South San Francisco to Sacramento.

Sembrano is a registered dental assistant and also runs a DJ business. As the pandemic worsened and DJing to live crowds dried up, it made less and less sense to continue paying the thousands of dollars in monthly rent on the storefront in San Bruno where he operated his business. He put his equipment into two 10- by 30-foot storage units and began driving out to Sacramento to visit relatives. They urged the Sembranos to take advantage of the low interest rates and buy a house near theirs in Natomas.

After a few visits to a place Sembrano initially dismissed as being “too far away” from the San Francisco culture—the nightlife, the scene that he loved—the family was sold on the idea. They wanted more space than they could afford in the Bay Area. They wanted a place to park their cars near their house. They wanted a place where their children could play with cousins out in the street or in their backyard. “The quality of life is better,” Sembrano says. “You don’t have to work all hours for a one-bedroom. Parking in the Bay Area is tight. We’d base our life around parking; it sucks. We want to raise our kids correctly. I don’t want to stuff our kids all in one room.”

The Sembranos found a house on the same street as their relatives—a SIZE TK house priced at just over $400,000—and moved in in early April. “Everything we’re getting is brand new,” Sembrano said on a phone call from South San Francisco, where he was clearing out their old rooms. “Brand new bed, brand new furniture. Isn’t that the American Dream? Brand new house, brand new things. It sounds too good to be true. We’re buying a house during the pandemic. Who does that? But the rates are low. I’m locked in at 3.2%, 30-year fixed. It’s been a long-time coming. I’m in my mid-30s. I should have done this long ago.”

Two years after they left the Bay Area, Arthur Chinn and Tom Richardson still sometimes get snide comments from Bay Area friends about their decision to move to Sacramento. “You moved to Sacramento? Why?” Chinn says he is routinely asked. He pauses to consider his response. “Well, why not?” he says. “People in Sacramento are friendly. They say hi when we walk past, and they smile in stores.”

Not only that, but the median home price is still less than $1 million.

Article source: https://www.sacmag.com/916/real-estate-the-bay-area-influence/

SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF/AP) — Even in the crazy world of San Francisco real estate, a $475,000 voluntary buyout offered to one couple to move out of the apartment they have lived in for three decades has captured the attention of social media and local residents.

The voluntary buyout is considered to be the largest in city history and reflects the high-value of the apartment.

READ MORE: SF Hospital Needs Help Identifying Woman In Critical Condition

The tenants, a couple in their 60s with teenage children, had been paying $12,500 a month recently for a seven-bed, eight-bath apartment. It takes up most of a floor in a century-old building with expansive views of the bay, Golden Gate Bridge and nearby Presidio park. They declined to be named.

San Francisco has among the strongest tenant protections in the country, which encourages tenants to hang on to apartments as market prices go up. While California has recently adopted rent control and other tenant protections, San Francisco approved its rent control ordinance back in 1979 as a way to alleviate the city’s housing crisis.

That means landlords can only raise rent on some properties a certain amount each year, with the current increase pegged at under 1%. Landlords cannot evict tenants without just cause, such as nonpayment of rent. Owners who want to move into their own single-family home must pay tenants to vacate. The maximum amount tenants in one unit can receive to relocate is $22,000, with an extra $5,000 for households with minor children or seniors 60 and up.

In this case, relocation costs did not apply; the landlord and renters reached a voluntary agreement for them to leave.

Steven Adair MacDonald, the lawyer who represents the couple, said reaction has been divided to a six-figure buyout that’s enough to purchase a home in most parts of the country.

“Landlord attorneys think it’s an outrage, and on the tenant side, everybody’s excited, they think it’s great,” he said. But MacDonald thinks the landlord is the winner, as he will be able to rent the apartment for $25,000 a month and recoup the buyout amount in just over three years.

“After that, it will be gravy, so it’s a great investment,” said MacDonald.

MacDonald is also suing the landlord, Friedman Properties, on behalf of “fairly well-heeled” tenants in nine other units who have moved out since March, unable to bear the constant noise and dust from ongoing renovations in the building.

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Marty Friedman, listed as the company’s authorized agent, did not respond to a phone call requesting comment.

KPIX asked the landlord’s attorney David Wasserman for comment on the buyout.

He explained that constructive eviction was never the landlord’s intent, noting that the landlord scheduled several much-needed renovations and maintenance projects prior to the pandemic. Those projects were complicated after the pandemic led to the stay-at-home order in San Francisco.

The Financial Times was first to report the agreement.

More than 300 tenant buyouts were filed with the San Francisco Rent Board in 2020. MacDonald said average buyouts are $50,000, and they are growing given the difference between market rent and length of tenant residency.

San Francisco rents declined during the pandemic, but still remain among the highest in the country. The average rent for a one-bedroom unit is $2,750, according to rental platform Zumper. The median sales price for a home is $1.5 million, according to Redfin.

Tenants groups say that without rent control, poor and working class residents would be driven out of San Francisco, unable to keep up with market rate rents.

Charley Goss, who handles government affairs for the San Francisco Apartment Association, said landlords accept that rent control is a part of doing business in the city. But there are situations where wealthier tenants hang on to a rent-controlled apartment, he said. The association represents about 4,500 landlords.

“Paying a half-million dollars to a wealthy person who’s been keeping a rent-controlled apartment in a city with a housing shortage and an affordability crisis kind of speaks to the way in which our local rent control distorts the market,” he said.

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© Copyright 2021 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. The Associated Press contributed to this report

Article source: https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2021/07/31/san-francisco-real-estate-tenants-get-475000-buyout-move-out/

SONOMA CO., Calif. (KGO) — Homes selling for way above list price is standard practice in San Francisco or San Jose. It’s also becoming the new normal in one of the Bay Area’s most rural counties: Sonoma.

Zillow data analyzed by ABC’s data journalism team shows a steep climb in homes selling above asking price in Sonoma County since the onset of the pandemic. In January 2020, only about 15% of homes in Sonoma County sold for above list price. By December 2020, 39% of homes were selling for more than asking.

The amount of money buyers are spending over list price saw the largest jump of any Bay Area county — 73% in one year.

“Anything below a million, there are dozens of offers,” said Alain-Martin Pierret, a Compass real estate agent in Sonoma County. “We have noticed that if it’s turnkey, well priced and ready to move in, people are willing to pay above asking price.”

See the trend in your county by using the drop-down menu in the graph below.

Having trouble viewing the chart? Click here to open it in a new window.

Pierret said regularly his homes are in contract before they’re even listed on MLS.

Sonoma County has long had its appeal to home buyers, with its beautiful coastline and world renowned wineries. But when the first COVID-19 lockdown hit California, it had another selling point to wealthy San Francisco and Silicon Valley residents: space, and lots of it.

“We saw a lot of people looking for a second home, and we also saw a lot of people that were saying, ‘We don’t need to be in an urban or suburban environment anymore. We can work from anywhere,’” said Maurice Tegelaar, also a local real estate agent.

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Suddenly, Pierret and Tegelaar became a lot more busy starting around April 2020. It hasn’t slowed down much since, especially in the luxury market. The first quarter of 2021 at Compass saw a 300% increase in Sonoma County home sales between $2 million and $3 million compared to the year before.

Business dipped slightly during August and September of 2020, as wildfires raged in and around Sonoma County, but the effect was hardly noticeable.

“If you’re in the kitchen of your beautiful home and you burn tortillas in the oven, you’re going to trigger the alarm and the kitchen is full of smoke. When you open the window the day after, there may be a little bit of smell but that’s it,” said Pierret. “Life resumes. The quality of life is so exceptional in Sonoma for the very reason that we have space for everybody.”

Pierret described an idyllic life in Sonoma County, where you can leave your door unlocked and buy fresh-from-the-farm produce before you pop by your favorite winery — the perfect place to feel far, far away from the pandemic.

Tegelaar’s clients seemed to feel the same way: “They said, ‘I can deal with fire, I can deal with all that. I can’t deal with COVID and the pandemic. I need a place to be.’”

Having trouble viewing the chart? Click here to open it in a new window.

While the Sonoma County real estate market shows no signs of slowing down, we’re still not talking about San Francisco home prices here. The median home value in the county is about $712,000, according to Zillow. While many homes are selling for over asking price, it’s not typically hundreds of thousands of dollars higher.

Having trouble viewing the chart? Click here to open it in a new window.

As the pandemic starts to (hopefully) wind down in the Bay Area, will the Sonoma real estate market do the same? Pierret and Tegelaar believe the region’s appeal will outlast the lockdown era — for those who can afford it.

ALSO: Are we in a bubble? Here’s what buyers and sellers should know

“We see a lot of young, talent executives, millennials in their mid-30s to mid-40s who have exceptional jobs, but they have realized can work anywhere they want to,” said Pierret. “They’re starting to say I’m not going to wait until 55 or 60 to have my dream country home. I’m going to buy it now, I’ll work there when I want to, I can go back to the city, but I’m going to start to enjoy my life immediately.”

Article source: https://abc7news.com/sonoma-county-homes-for-sale-real-estate-zillow-bay-area-housing-market/10584893/

The Vallejo-Fairfield metro area was No.1 on the list in February and has been on the company’s top 20 list for the last several years. But during the pandemic, homes in that market have been selling at a particularly rapid pace.

In February, half of Vallejo homes sold under 14 days, 21 days faster than last year and 49 days quicker than the U.S. average. And while the median listing price increased 7.8% from February to March, it’s still much more affordable compared to its large Bay Area neighbors, San Francisco and San Jose.

Realtor.com takes into account market demand and pace of the market to determine an area’s “hotness.” That is determined by the number of unique viewers per property and the number of days a listing is active on Realtor.com’s website.

In the latest hottest housing markets report, California had six in the top 20, more than any other state. Nicolas Bedo, economic research analyst for Realtor.com, said California has always been a popular place to live since 2016, the furthest back the company’s data goes.

“Temperate climates and tech jobs have buoyed major California markets for a long time,” he said. “Tech hubs like San Francisco and San Jose have drawn substantial homebuyer demand over the years. However, as those markets became too expensive to sustain the demand, ‘spillover’ markets like Vallejo and Stockton have risen to take their place as homebuyer hot spots.”

He said California’s “continued and expanding economic growth” consistently produces up-and-coming markets that offer affordability compared to major cities, and the draw for cheaper markets has only escalated with declining mortgage rates that hit a historic low of 2.86% at the beginning of the year. But now they are starting to tick back up, reaching 2.99% in March, which is the highest rate since September 2020.

“The combination of rising prices and rising rates adds a ticking clock for buyers looking to stay within their budget,” he said. “This is especially true in California where higher-than-average home prices mean even bigger dollar swings in monthly payments as mortgage rates rise and fall.”

While affordability is still driving demand, median listing prices for the hottest markets were on average 18.9% higher than the national price in March. This may reflect a willingness of buyers to pursue pricier homes as they aim to lock in favorable mortgage rates, which are projected to keep climbing.

Other Northern California cities in the top 20 include Yuba City in Sutter County, which came in seventh place with a median listing price of $427,000. The Santa Cruz-Watsonville area was No. 8, with a median listing price of $1.2 million, and Stockton-Lodi followed at No. 9 with a median listing price of $468,000. The Modesto area came in at No. 12, with a median listing price of $499,000. And in the far northwest corner of the state, the Eureka-Arcata-Fortuna area came in at No. 18, with a median listing price of $439,000.

Here is the full list (the chart can also be seen here):

Kellie Hwang is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: kellie.hwang@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @KellieHwang

That was in September 2020. By Thanksgiving, they had moved there, joining the thousands of people who have relocated from California to Montana in the past two years. 

While the move was abrupt, Vermel and her husband had thought about leaving the Bay Area for years. She said they would often do “real estate tourism” on Zillow and browse houses in other cities they might move to. They considered Asheville, North Carolina, but there wasn’t much of a tech community there, something her husband was looking for. They also thought about Austin, but quickly realized it wasn’t quite as affordable as it once was, and it wasn’t going to be a big enough improvement in their living situation. They’d almost settled on Ashland, Oregon when the 2020 fire season hit, making the West Coast seem like a less desirable option. 

Vermel is from Montana and still has lots of family there, so once they made the choice, the transition was fairly easy. They were able to sell their Oakland home and get a much larger property in Missoula, the second-largest city in the state. “Being able to sell a Bay Area home meant that we could have a lot more,” she said. “We went from 1,600 square feet with houses packed around us to 180-degree mountain views.” 

But even though they’d found a great home, the real-estate transaction felt contentious and difficult — until the seller found out that Vermel “wasn’t really from California.” The median home price in Missoula has increased 20.5% in the past year, and according to a study conducted by MSU Billings, 75% of real estate agents surveyed saw interested buyers from California.

Many native Montana residents aren’t happy with the amount of out-of-state residents coming in and snapping up homes, and they’re not shy about saying so. Vermel says a friend was harassed at a gas station when she was filling up her car with California plates; Vermel’s dad, who lives in town, has had to defend her right to move back to the state.

Still, this has happened before, Vermel pointed out.  She remembers growing up and seeing anti-California bumper stickers in the late 1980s. She refuses to get discouraged. “This isn’t new. It’s the same old pattern,” she said. 

Lauren Craigie and her boyfriend, who moved to Bozeman in April 2020 and both work in tech, don’t say they moved from California when people ask. They mention the states where they grew up — Connecticut and Ohio respectively —  and they changed their licenses right away. “Part of me is annoyed that [locals] even care. Why are they special for just being born here? Because I’ve lived in so many different places, I don’t feel like a Californian. That was just part of my life,” Craigie said. “I think I’m still navigating the best way to handle that conversation.”

The couple had already planned to move from SoMa to Bozeman when the pandemic hit, hoping to take advantage of the city’s proximity to outdoor activities and lower cost of living. While they love the city, they said the transition wasn’t ideal, since it was hard to meet people during the pandemic. They wish they’d bought a house right away, instead of signing a lease to rent. In Bozeman, the median sales price of a home has increased 25%, and just a few months ago, they put an offer on a house, only to be immediately outbid by a cash offer. They have now decided to just wait it out another year.

“There’s a ton of anti-California sentiment in the area, especially from the all-cash buyers coming in…I do feel awful that if I do buy a home I’m taking it from like a teacher or a firefighter and some people can’t afford to live here anymore,” Craigie said. “I feel like I’m contributing to the problem, but I kind of felt that way in San Francisco too.”

While cost of living is typically a big driver for those leaving the Bay Area, Matthew Cooper wanted to move to a state with more right-leaning politics that matched his own. He’s a truck driver that lives in Sonoma County and doesn’t have much faith in where the country is headed. He wanted to find somewhere rural to live — he also considered Idaho — and learn to “live off the land.” 

He’s already purchased 21 acres outside Helena, but he’s waiting to sell his Sonoma home until he figures out his work situation in Montana. In the meantime, he’s taken his family to visit, and they’re all excited about the move.

Cooper says that he’s also encountered people that are hostile toward another Californian moving in, but he deflects the conversation immediately. “I say yes, I’m from ‘Commiefornia,’ but don’t worry, I’m not bringing any of that crap up here. I’m escaping it. Then everything is fine. There is a lot of opposition to people bringing the politics from here to there.”

For Cooper, who has lived in Sonoma County most of his life, the only thing he’ll miss about Sonoma is the weather. 

Former Marin county resident Megan Hansen moved to Bozeman, MT without having ever visited. Her interactions with locals have been mostly positive, she says.  “When someone asks, you’re almost apologetic when you say you’re from California,” Hansen said. “…I do hope that the Californians coming here are figuring out how we can give back.”

Even in 2019, Carolyne Calvin, a realtor with Keller Williams Montana Realty, said 85% of her buyers were from out of state. Just in 2021 so far, Calvin said the market in and around Bozeman has been so frantic, she’s sold at least 12 homes sight unseen. Those moving from places like Texas, Seattle and the Bay Area know how hot the housing market is, and they don’t have time to come into town every time they want to see a property. She said that while it’s good for business and those that want to sell their home, she feels badly for local buyers that are getting priced out of the immediate market and have to go out to outlying areas.

As with most moves, there are trade offs for those migrating from the Bay Area. Vermel said she misses great restaurants, particularly Mexican food. But she loves that there are dozens of kids on her street the same age as her children and she doesn’t have to worry about them exploring the neighborhood on their own. What she misses most is the diversity in the Bay Area — the state of Montana is 88% white. 

Lance Trebesch, CEO of Eventgroove, said diversity seems like it’s actually gotten slightly better since he moved to Bozeman 17 years ago from the Bay Area, but he believes the city and state still have a long way to go. Hopefully, the growing tech community, coupled with an emerging remote workforce, should help.

“People have figured out what a great place this is,” he said. “The level of outdoor activities is top notch. There’s an emerging tech cluster. The schools are excellent…it’s not perfect, but why not live in a place like this?”