ST. GEORGE — When looking to buy a second home for luxury purposes, more homebuyers are looking to the red rocks and warm desert climate of Southern Utah instead of the usual lake front, oceanside, or forested mountain getaways.
According to Pacaso, an online real estate platform, Washington County, Utah had the most number of mortgage rate locks for second homes in the nation experiencing a 10.3% year-over-year jump. The average price of a luxury second home in the county is $1.3 million, according to the news release.
A mortgage rate lock, also known as rate protection, keeps your interest rate from rising between the time you apply for a mortgage and the time you close on your new loan. On the other hand, if you lock your rate and interest rates fall, you can’t take advantage of the lower rate on a refinance unless your rate lock includes a float-down option, which allows you to take advantage of an interest rate decrease during your lock period.
Many of the counties listed in the research are regularly on the top-ten list, such as Osceola County, Florida, Santa Fe County, New Mexico and Kauai County, Hawaii, said Pacaso CEO Austin Allison.
“What’s interesting here is that many of the counties that saw the largest year-over-year shift toward second home buying activity this year are already regarded as luxury top second home destinations,” Allison said. “But this year there’s a mix of established markets and up-and-coming destinations. Modest price growth, and perhaps even price drops in some markets, could be contributing to some buyers turning again to these established locations to find the second home of their dreams.”
St. George News spoke with two St. George realtors who both said there has always been a lot of second home sales in the metropolitan area, but the biggest increase they noticed was after the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
While “snowbirds” have always considered Southern Utah for retirement due to the year-round warm climate and mild winters, the pandemic opened the door for younger homeowners who were placed in similar situations as retirees, said Nate Shaffer from the Shaffer Team Real Estate.
“A snowbird is someone who can afford two homes, and the second one is the house they can buy anywhere they want, usually the one they retire in,” he said. “During the pandemic you had offices shutting down all over America and the younger generation could choose to live anywhere they wanted and work from home. St. George is known for having a great community, good schools, and next to lots of outdoor opportunities. I imagine a lot of younger couples chose to relocate here for that reason.”
Amie Larsen, of Exit Realty Legacy Excellence, said those who could afford a second home during the pandemic might have chosen Southern Utah because of tight pandemic restrictions in their first home locations.
“A lot of people moved into the area from California during the pandemic,” she said. “You couldn’t go out into public without a mask, you couldn’t go to the beaches, the restrictions in the places they were living were much stricter than we had.”
According to 2019 statistics from the National Association of Realtors for the St. George metropolitan area, the last year statistics were available due to the pandemic, the average home buyer in St. George is 60 years old with an average income of $83,473.
Of the buyers who bought homes in that year, 42.7% already lived in the St. George metro area, 35.9% moved to St. George metro from another state, 17.5% moved from another residence in Washington County and 3.9% moved from within the state of Utah.
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