Why have thousands upon thousands of very wealthy people suddenly felt an overwhelming urge to buy a home in Montana? At this moment, Montana is one of the hottest real estate markets in the entire country. When a desirable house is put on the market, it can often spark a wild bidding war. Of course the vast majority of the potential buyers involved in these bidding wars do not actually have any roots in Montana at all. Vast hordes of wealthy individuals from Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York and other major cities are flooding into the state, and there is only a limited amount of housing to accommodate them. As a result, home prices are being pushed to absolutely absurd levels.
In the Flathead Valley, home builders have been working incredibly hard to construct houses for the new arrivals. The following comes from a New York Post article entitled “Montana, the sold-out state New Yorkers can’t get enough of”…
All around the Lodge, along Montana Highway 35, from Kalispell to Whitefish, are what the locals call “COVID homes,” prefabricated track houses that line up along what used to be a timber farm — all of which were built last year and sold at around $550,000.
“Most were bought sight unseen for cash deals,” said Doug Averill.
$550,000 may have seemed like a hefty price when those homes originally went up, but today $550,000 would be considered a bargain price.
That is because the average selling price of a home in Flathead County has now risen to more than $638,000…
In May 2020, the average sale price for a home in Flathead County was $447,387 — a year later it had increased to $638,992. The average number of days a property stayed on the market has been cut almost in half, from 77 days in May 2020 to 41 days in May 2021.
The Flathead Valley possesses great natural beauty, and Whitefish in particular has become an extremely popular tourist destination.
All of this interest in Whitefish has helped to fuel a home price boom that is unlike anything the region has ever experienced…
While this may be good for realtors, locals are shell-shocked at the price hikes due to what the Flathead Beacon called the “COVID migration” from states like New York. “(The housing crisis) is happening all over Montana,” one Whitefish local told The Post. “No one who is from here can actually afford to live here anymore.”
According to Realtor.com, just before the pandemic in December 2019, the average home price in Whitefish, a town of 7,700 people just south of Glacier National Park, was $369,450. A year and a half later, that has almost doubled — and the average home price is now $704,000. Local average wages in Whitefish are just $30,642, according to bestplaces.net.
Only the wealthy have enough money to relocate to Whitefish now, and many locals with roots in the area are having to leave for good because housing has become so ridiculously expensive.
A similar thing is happening over in Missoula. From last May to this May, the median sales price in Missoula shot up a staggering 41 percent…
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