Redfin users in New York searched for homes in Boston most, and in San Francisco they shopped for a new address in Sacramento, Redfin reported.
Milwaukeeans? They shopped in Chicago.
Michael and Stephanie Stark are in the midst of their move from Chicago's Galewood neighborhood to Granger, a suburb of South Bend. In November the couple, who have one child and another due in early 2021, traded a 2,700-square-foot bungalow on a standard 25-by-125-foot Chicago lot for a 5,500-square-foot house on three-quarters of an acre.
"Right now I'm looking out at ducks on a pond," Michael Stark, an executive in a Chicago-based restaurant data firm called Emerging, said in a phone interview today. His job can be done from anywhere, and her work as a designer is mostly on hold with young children taking her time, so when the pandemic hit, Michael Stark said, "it nudged us to do something we might have done a few years from now."
Searching for homes in a big crescent around the southeast corner of Lake Michigan, the Starks settled on the South Bend area, which he knew from his undergrad days at Notre Dame. When life returns to normal after the pandemic, Michael Stark figures he'll drive over to Chicago once or twice a week. "My work was already remote before this started," he said.
The couple asked that their former and current homes' prices not be published, but Michael Stark said that they paid more for the new place than they got for the old one. "We got a lot more house with much better taxes," Michael Stark said. They're paying 18 percent more in property taxes for a little over 100 percent more house.
"When people come here, they're amazed at how much they can purchase," said Stephanie Weldy, president of the South Bend Area Realtors Association and a Berkshire Hathaway and a Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices agent. When they come from Chicago, she said, "they're surprised you can find all this so close to Chicago."
'All this,' in Weldy's description, is good schools, big yards, arts, restaurants, and sports, both associated with the university and independent of it.
In South Bend, for about Chicago's median home sale price, $269,900, a buyer could pick up this three-bedroom Tudor several blocks' walk from the downtown core or this five-bedroom house near the northwest city limits.
Redfin's data gathering attempted to weed out the daydreamers and focus on people seriously considering moving. The report includes only people who have viewed at least 10 houses in the out-of-town location, and for whom at least 80 percent of their views are in that same area. Data from Redfin competitors Zillow shows a similar level of Chicagoans looking at South Bend, Matt Kreamer in Zillow's data public relations office confirmed.
John De Souza, president of Cressy & Everett Real Estate, one of the biggest residential firms in the region, said page views on his firm's website by Chicagoans are up 42 percent in the second half of the year, compared to the same time in 2019. They're getting higher levels of search from people around Detroit and Indianapolis as well, De Souza said, but "Chicago is the biggest."
De Souza said his office has handled at least four buyers who've moved from the Chicago area in the past few months, although all of them declined his request to talk to Crain's for this article.
Not only is South Bend a genuine city, as opposed to a small town, it's been undergoing an urban renaissance, according to De Souza, Weldy and Faith Fleming, a Cressy & Everett agent. "There's a new, interesting life in downtown," Fleming said. As Wired, the New York Times and other publications detailed during Buttigieg's presidential run, during his tenure as mayor there was a dedicated effort to remake the old industrial sections, home to a Studebaker plant among other things.
Now there are new apartment buildings and, at least before the pandemic, "some very nice restaurants," Fleming said.
South Bend is about a two-hour drive from Chicago. A project to upgrade the South Shore rail line with double tracks, which will reduce the need for trains to stop as others pass, is expected to cut the train ride to 90 minutes.
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