Have a co-worker who moved from California to Spokane, sold his house for over a million and bought an equivalent house on large acreage lot for less than half. His parents moved 2 years ago, doing the same thing.<p>And hes not the only one, the large 20+ acre lots being craved up in the rural areas. Sold to California transplants. These houses on acrage are going for about 500-600k each, creating large tracks of new high taxable for the rural cities. And normally too expensive for locals, so transplants are the ones buying these large plots.<p>Also, I have inlaws on the Deer Park city council, California retirees moving in have been buying up the houses over 200k. They actually ran out of houses in the smaller city just north of Spokane. The new golf course has empty plots just waiting for new homes to be built.<p>When you can get average old houses in town for around 120k, and land outside the city for 40k, you can see why people are moving.<p>I have land north of Spokane, that I plan on retiring on, well and power already installed, just an hour north, and away from people. Throw a log cabin home or manufactured double wide with metal roof on it. Only issue is Internet is limited to Verizon LTE, but by the time I'm retired, wireless internet from sat and cell will be common. Thanks SpaceX!<p>Also, when I left Spokane for Seattle for work 20+ years ago, Spokane put in Fiber in all the downtown for cities. The ISP was working at couled get bandwidth cheap.<p>Also spokane has businesses that do cloud based services like banking backups and hosting companies. Wages go for about 20-30k cheaper than Seattle, just about the amount that makes the difference in a mortgage. A old high school friend works at a web hosting business for company, and they have almost 100 employees. Expect more with companies moving out of the big cities for places like Spokane.<p>But, the commute times are starting to go up, I hear my friends telling me how its getting bad. But I cant believe its as bad as Seattle.
<i>"Tollefson has some big plans for her Central Spokane property. The 23-year-old gets the keys to her first home Thursday.
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If you think Megan is unusually young to buy a house - you're half right. Megan is young, but more and more people her age are committing to real estate.<p>According to the US Census Bureau, 36 percent of every American under the age of 35 owns their own home; a dramatic increase from just last year, when the percentage was 34.7 percent for the same age group."</i>