What I’m wondering is if people leaving these major metropolises is driving the current hot real estate market in San Diego? Or is it just low interest rates allowing people a good opportunity to buy their first house or move up? What happens if people move out of London, NYC, San Fran, but in a year employers are done with work from home?[/quote]
Not so sure. I think at least for many tech companies now that companies are more remote friendly it’s unlikely things will return to in office only in the near to mid term.
For one thing, my company cancelled their office lease and we no longer have a San Diego office. Everyone in San Diego is now a remote employee
That might be on the extreme, but some companies probably don’t need to maintain a large physical office moving forward.
Also, now that remote working is more acceptable, it’s entirely possible to find a great person in Florida and pay him/her slightly lover than Bay Area wages which would make him/her thrilled compared to how much he could make working at a local company in Florida. I had a person quit in a group in Florida because a bay area company will allow him to work remotely and he will be making 38% more than he would if he worked in a comparable Florida company.
This probably won’t drive wages down significantly locally, but it will make wages more competitive irrespective of geography and locally companies no longer need to spend expensive local wages on just mediocre talent. Take a Site Reliability Engineer. Since most of things are in the clouds, there’s really no reason why an SRE has to be based here in San Diego. Good SRE’s are hard to find, so rather than spend a boatload on a mediocre SRE in SD, one could find a great candidate anywhere and pay them SD wages to work remotely.
