Coronavirus has left a huge gap across the globe, in many different ways. It is now up to humans to become creative and innovative and make something useful out of this gap.
When it comes to the real estate industry, one of the main drivers of the changes and trends is the COVID-19 pandemic. And, this report will analyze how this pandemic impacted real estate in 2022.
House Hunting Now Goes Digital
In just a few months’ time, the COVID-19 has brought about decades of change in the way companies from different industries do business. It’s a fact that the pandemic has cut off most business operations, badly impacting these organizations and their revenue as well as consumers. And, thus under such circumstances, most industries have moved dramatically toward online channels.
The coronavirus has pushed many companies to implement the go-digital policy but for most organizations, it was not easy to adopt this policy within days. The time for everything to be properly planned before activating this policy was much less, but fortunately the results in some industries have been particularly satisfying.
For instance, to cope with the impacts of the pandemic, the real estate industry, like the other sectors, has moved forward and begun its digital transformation, by converting the house hunting process into a consumer-safe and digital procedure.
To ensure the safety of consumers and to abide by the law, the real estate industry no longer requires people to step foot inside of a house before purchasing it. But, that doesn’t mean you won’t be able to know what your future house looks like.
When the lockdown was being imposed, some people were still lucky enough to do virtually tour property thanks to the following digital technologies:
- Drone videos
- 3D Tours
- Virtual staging
There are several online real estate companies such as Zillow that allow potential buyers to have virtual tours and home sellers to browse listings and get in touch with realtors.
Usually, there is that one biggest wildcard that when house hunting most potential buyers like to consider – I’m talking about the neighborhood. I remember three years ago, a prospective buyer in my neighborhood even went door-to-door, introducing herself to potential future neighbors. The woman was very friendly, but specifically wanted to know about any red flags within the neighborhood. I thought that was a really smart idea and I think a lot of people does that. And, today such thing is still possible with websites like Nextdoor and other technologies that allow someone to learn more about a specific neighborhood – but, of course, that won’t tell you if your neighbor is smoking weed in his backyard.
A Rise in Demand for Single-Family Houses
A few decades ago, no matter how safe and cozy the suburbs were, the trend was to leave them and live in big cities like Los Angeles, New York or Chicago. However, since 2020, Americans have been moving out of big cities and leaving behind their glamorous lives and the one destination they have been moving to is the suburbs.
Under the COVID-19 circumstances, all companies were forced to activate the work-at-home policy for all their workers. So, this new trend meant that employees no longer needed to live near their workplaces, which eventually resulted in around 23 million Americans workers moving due to being able to work from home (as per statistics of 2020).
So, as soon as the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic triggered the migration from big cities to suburbs, the demand for single-family homes rose significantly.
As per the chief economist of Redfin, searches for single-family houses were at the highest level since 2020. And, a few real estate experts have even predicted that the demand for single-family homes will rise up to 10 -20 % more in upcoming years.
