Why Are Hordes Of Wealthy People Hitting The Escape Button And Heading To Montana?

Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

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.

Needless to say, the vast majority of Americans cannot afford a $700,000 home.

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…

New real estate data for the month of May shows an increasingly competitive market in western Montana.

New Multiple Listing Service data shows the median sales price in Missoula increased 41% from May 2020 to May 2021, up to $449,338.

Ten years ago, the median sales price in Missoula was just $205,000.

If you go all the way back to 2001, it was just $138,000.

Things are getting crazy in Bozeman too.  At this point, “the average home in the greater Bozeman area is going for more than $650,000”…

One hundred thirty thousand dollars. That’s what it takes for a down payment to buy an average-priced home in Bozeman, Montana. Then an aspiring homeowner must fork out another $3,000 each month, which is more than two-thirds of their household’s paychecks if they make the median income for the metro area.

That’s because the average home in the greater Bozeman area is going for more than $650,000, up from an already astronomical $500,000 in early 2020.

So why is this happening?

Why are home prices in Montana and other desirable locations around the country going absolutely nuts?

Many are blaming the COVID pandemic, and that certainly played a major role at first, but now the COVID pandemic is subsiding.

Ultimately, I believe the the largest reason why we are seeing such a home buying frenzy is because people can see that our society is starting to come apart at the seams and they can sense that enormous trouble is ahead.

Just consider what happened this weekend.  We literally witnessed mass shootings in four different U.S. cities in a period of just six hours…

At least four major U.S. cities were reeling from an onslaught of mass shootings over the weekend that left at least 39 people wounded, five dead and police officials alarmed that the surge in gun violence is a prelude to a bloody summer as the nation emerges from the pandemic.

Police in Austin, Cleveland, Chicago and Savannah were all investigating on Sunday mass shootings that erupted over a six-hour streak that began around 9 p.m. on Friday and spilled over into Saturday morning.

All over America, countless numbers of people are finally waking up and realizing that it is time to leave the major cities and head for greener pastures.

As I have been encouraging people to do for years, those that are leaving are looking for areas with low population density and low crime rates.

Of course the wealthy also value great natural beauty, and this is one of the big reasons why the Flathead Valley has become so popular.

And once they have purchased their beautiful new homes in remote parts of the nation, many wealthy individuals are filling them up with emergency food and supplies.

Collectively, rich people tend to be much more into “prepping” than the general population as a whole.

Sadly, the vast majority of the population is still asleep.  The mainstream media keeps telling us that everything is going to work out just fine somehow, and most Americans blindly believe them.

Meanwhile, many among the wealthy are buying up properties in remote locations at a blistering pace, and this is going to permanently change the character of those communities.

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Michael’s new book entitled “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.