Work from home is reshaping the housing market 5 years after COVID
In mid-2019, New York University professors Allison Squires and her husband, Simon Jones, were moseying around Dutchess County, a picturesque area along the Hudson River a little too far away from Manhattan to make for an easy commute.
The couple found a “lovely” 200-year-old farmhouse on 2 acres and bought it, thinking it would make a nice country retreat when they needed to escape their small city apartment. But just a year later, as New York and the rest of the world entered the COVID-19 lockdown, they gave up their city apartment and their university offices and made the farmhouse the nexus of their busy lives.
Five years on, Squires says remote work for two people who might just as easily be traveling to Washington for a conference or hosting a Zoom meeting with people from around the globe as they are to be going to NYU to lecture makes all the sense in the world.
“Academics always had a lot of flexibility and freedom to be in their office or not be in their office,” she said. “The great joke about our change is that my primary job is estate manager for this house, and my NYU professorship is a side gig.”
Five years after a novel coronavirus swept the world and ushered in the first stay-at-home orders in modern memory, remote work has changed our lives. Despite recent return-to-office mandates, far more Americans are working from home than before the pandemic, and that number is likely to grow – if gradually – over time.
In the process, housing has changed, too: Where we live, how we live, even why we make the choices we do are, for many of us, very different from anything we could have imagined in 2019. Housing market observers see the pandemic as a moment of flux, which many Americans seized on to redefine their living arrangements.
“There really was this moment in, like, July of 2020 where people really knew what was wrong with their houses,” said Rona Fischman, a longtime real estate agent in Somerville, Massachusetts. “And they wanted to move.” In some cases, that meant a home with another bedroom, Fischman said. For other people, it meant a different community altogether.
“People were much clearer on what they didn’t want,” she said.
Remote work allows for flexibility
It was crystal-clear for Jola Pieslak, now 39. Pieslak was living in a bedroom community outside Aspen, Colorado, with her fiancé. Both were able to work from home easily and with the support of their employers, but the area “just got too expensive for us to live,” she told Paste BN. Data from Realtor.com shows the median price of a home there is $3.9 million, which makes it one of the most expensive areas of the country.
“So we started to kind of look around and say, 'Where else could we go that has a lifestyle that we want?'” Pieslak said.
Both were Westerners, and though they itched to be along the coast, prices in California turned out to be out of reach. “So we kind of just followed the mountains up and moved north,” Pieslak said. Along the way, they discovered Spokane, Washington, where the median home price is a relatively modest $440,000.
“We like the vibe here,” she added. “And it just kind of all fell into place.”
Americans’ shifting living situations reflect a work landscape that probably has been permanently transformed, says Steven J. Davis, senior fellow and director of research at the Hoover Institution. Davis, along with frequent co-author Nicholas Bloom, is one of the most prolific scholars on work-from-home trends. His most recent paper is a roundup of research on the topic.
As of February 2025, about 28% of American work-hours are done from home, Davis said in an interview, roughly four times as much as pre-pandemic levels. Davis believes that for the most part, much of the jockeying of the post-lockdown period has mostly shaken out, and most employers have settled on the arrangement they’re most comfortable with.
Despite that, he said, the share of Americans working remotely will gradually increase over time. That’s because younger companies tend to be more accepting of remote work than older, more entrenched ones. As younger companies grab a greater share of the economy and its workers, remote work will too, Davis said.
Meanwhile, the pandemic-era migrations as well as the increased options for at least 28% of Americans means communities will need to work harder to attract residents, he said.
“The demands of work no longer restrict you as much geographically as they did before the pandemic, and so the decision about whether or not you really want to reside in the city now turns more on things like: Is it safe? Is it pleasant to be there? Does it offer good schools for my children at a reasonable value?” Davis told Paste BN.
Some metro areas that have struggled since the pandemic broke out are “really taking it on the chin,” Davis said, mentioning San Francisco and Seattle. “They're just much less desirable places to be because you no longer need to be in or near the city in order to save on the commute.”
Home prices skyrocket
The opportunity to buy a home that beckoned Pieslak to Spokane also fueled an upheaval in the national housing landscape.
“Home prices rose at an unprecedented pace in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic as interest rates fell to record lows, the large cohort of millennials aged increasingly into prime homebuying years, and the supply of housing available for purchase remained limited,” researchers at the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University wrote in a recent analysis.
From March 2020 to March 2023, they found, prices rose 21%, on average, in higher-density urban counties but by more than one-third in “rural counties, smaller metro areas, and the lower-density suburbs of large metro areas.”
That shift made otherwise more affordable areas of the country increasingly out of reach for ordinary Americans, the researchers noted.
A 2022 paper from the San Francisco Fed found that the shift to remote work accounted for more than half of overall house price growth over the pandemic – though at the time of its publication, slightly more Americans were estimated to be working from home than in Davis’ 2025 estimate.
“The national increase in remote work indeed caused an increase in housing demand,” the San Francisco Fed researchers wrote.
Yet for some places, an influx of residents is a boon, even if it comes with rising home prices.
In Allison Squires’ new hometown in New York, it was mostly retirees, not young families, who settled there. At one point, locals had worried that they wouldn’t have enough children to field a Little League.
“It's brought in a lot of families, and so now they've got this massive Little League,” she said. “It's quadrupled in size from pre-pandemic. And there's other new housing developments that are also drawing young families.”