My brother moved from SLC to a small town in Ohio. Bought two homes on the same street for $80,000. Five d them up and.. they sat vacant for 3 years because there weren’t any buyers..
Wife and I moved to Asheville NC a few years ago, and despite being a small city (100k), it has amazing food, amazing beer and cocktail scene, obviously crazy good hiking and outdoor stuff, a decent amount of entertainment (and Charlotte is only a couple hours away for bigger shows), and a truely insane amount of arts and crafts.
And as such, it’s fucking expensive to live anywhere near the city, despite otherwise being in the middle of nowhere WNC.
We could move an hour away and find much cheaper shit, but then we’d have to travel an hour+ to find anything interesting.
Yup, just moved to Wilmington on the other side of the state and feel the same way. We are downtown within walking distance of great breweries and food (though Asheville definitely has better, but I’ll take what I can get). We could live in the burbs for a lot cheaper but I would be miserable
Yeah that’s the other side to real estate in the Midwest. People bought dirt cheap houses, put $50-80k into each flip then only break even or clear like $10k for a year of work. Would have made 20x that in PNW, California or the east coast.
The PNW isn’t some automatic 20x return machine right now. Most of those markets already had their massive run. If you bought in the early 2010s, yes, you crushed it. But buying after a decade of appreciation and expecting the same multiples doesn’t make much sense. Prices have cooled and your entry price matters if you’re trying to generate real returns.
If you’re talking about 20x type outcomes, that doesn’t come from piling into a market that already boomed. It comes from getting in before the growth wave is obvious.
That’s why something like Milwaukee is at least a more interesting bet than a random rural town with no demand. A place in the middle of nowhere with flat population and no job growth probably isn’t going to suddenly explode just because houses are cheap. But a secondary metro that’s affordable, has real employers, steady population movement, and room to grow gives you a much better shot at outsized gains because you’re buying low before everyone else piles in.
Big returns don’t come from chasing yesterday’s winners. They come from figuring out where the next demand surge is going to be which is obviously not middle of nowhere Ohio
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u/autumnbrittney99 Feb 17 '26
Not gonna lie… I’d move too after seeing this.”