Some sellers are putting properties on the market to be closer to the office, as companies shift back to in-person work and hybrid schedules
3 min
After three years of living in her dream home in a Texas community called Rocky Creek Ranch, Donna Rutter is giving it up to move closer to the accounting firm she bought in the nearby city of Fort Worth.
Rutter spent most of her 30-year career as a CPA for large firms in Dallas and Fort Worth. Even before Covid, she had a work style that allowed her some flexibility. She didn’t have a central office she went to every day, but she had clients she travelled to visit on site. That schedule allowed her to build a home in Rocky Creek, about 20 minutes from downtown Fort Worth.
Then the pandemic hit and she gave up travel and went fully remote. Now, with the pandemic-influenced lifestyle waning and the importance of being in the office growing, she has been drawn back into the workplace but for different reasons. In 2021, she bought her own firm, renamed Donna R Rutter CPA PC, and started working from her desk each week.
“Small businesses weren’t really set up to work remotely,” said Rutter, 59. “My clients want me in the office. They want to meet with me.”
The only problem, she said, was that her office is near central Fort Worth, making her commute about 45 minutes each way. She decided that is too long, and is moving closer to her new business. Her roughly 11-acre ranchette is now on the market for $1.75 million.
Rutter is just one of many homeowners making the decision to relocate closer to work.
According to a September report by Redfin, about 10% of home sellers in the U.S. are looking to move because of return-to-work policies, indicating that after more than three years of remote-work policies dominating behaviour in the housing market, the in-person, 9-to-5 lifestyle is picking up some steam. Average office attendance last week was 50.5% of the pre pandemic level in February 2020 across 10 major U.S. cities, including New York and San Francisco, according to Kastle, which tracks security-badge swipes into the buildings they secure.
In May and June, Redfin’s study surveyed more than 600 people across the country who were likely to sell and move within the next year, according to chief economist Daryl Fairweather. The findings follow more than a year of announcements from major corporations—including Apple, Walt Disney, Google and Tesla—calling remote employees back to the office.
In Seattle, local real-estate agent David Palmer of Redfin said that so far this year, he has received about 10% more inquiries than in 2022 from clients looking to relocate closer to the city because their jobs require a hybrid work schedule.
“I have a buyer who moved out of the city during the pandemic. He now works for Google and, long story short, he needs to commute three days a week and it’s about a two-hour commute each way,” he said. “So he’s actively looking to buy something.” Palmer’s client didn’t respond to a request for an interview.
Google has announced it will consider office attendance records in performance reviews, The Wall Street Journal reported in June. The company began calling employees back to the office a few days a week in April 2022.
Austin-based real-estate agent Matt Holm of Compass said that since Elon Musk called his employees back to the office, he has had several clients looking to move to the city to work for, or with, Tesla, where the company is headquartered. Last year, Musk told Tesla employees they are required to spend at least 40 hours a week in company offices, The Wall Street Journal reported. He sent the same message to employees of his rocket company, Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, which also operates in Texas.
Finding affordable housing in Austin for some of the incoming workers can be tough, Holm said. Those who can’t, often settle down in nearby markets, such as San Antonio and Killeen, because they are cheaper, he said. In October, the median sale price in the Austin metro area was about $444,000, down 6.5% from October 2022, Redfin said.
But for the employees who can afford Austin prices, Holm added, the demand has been a welcome boost to the housing market, which has seen slowed sales due to rising interest rates. On average, homes in the Austin metro area are sitting on the market for 63 days, Redfin stated, up from 53 days during the same period in 2022.
The sentiment around relocating for in-person attendance is mixed, Palmer said, “I have some clients who don’t mind, others who are a bit peeved.”
Rutter and her husband, Steve Lewis, 61, built their roughly 4,000-square-foot ranchette in late 2019. They outfitted it with vaulted ceilings, a heated saltwater pool, a dog shower and an outdoor kitchen, among other features.
While the home they have bought closer to the city is just 20 minutes from her office, it is about 1,000 square feet smaller and sits on about a third of an acre. She declined to disclose the purchase price. “We don’t have as much room,” she said, but added she is excited for a change and a shorter commute.
The couple’s ranchette is garnering interest from potential buyers, according to their listing agent, John Giordano of Compass. Rocky Creek Ranch is a desirable area because of the steady demand for ranchettes and because of its proximity to downtown Fort Worth, he said, adding that homes there rarely come up for sale.
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A historic Barbados estate with a 300-year-old villa and 11 acres overlooking the Caribbean Sea is now for sale with a guide price of $22.5 million.
The seller is Kit Braden, chairman of the U.K. branch of French beauty empire L’Occitane Group, whose family has spent every winter for the last 13 years at the island property, known as Fustic Estate.
“It’s very much a family house,” Braden said. “We love having a lot of people there. It’s a collection point to keep everyone together.”
The main villa dates to 1712, though it’s been reimagined and expanded substantially over the years.
It spans 13,000 square feet and features seven en suite bedrooms across three wings, as well as expansive verandas, stone courtyards and rows of louvered doors in gay Caribbean pastels.
In the 1970s, when the home was owned by Charles Graves—brother of British poet Robert Graves—it was reimagined by stage designer Oliver Messel, one of the foremost theater designers of the last century. Messel expanded the home, added a lagoon pool with a natural waterfall and other theatrical features, according to Braden.
“The whole place is a little bit magical,” he said.
The home sits about 350 feet above the water, and surrounded by lush gardens that slope towards the water.
“We look down through our garden—which is about 12 acres of tropical gardens and palm trees and wonderful old mahogany trees—onto the Caribbean,” Braden said.
He and his wife first saw the property on New Year’s Eve 2013, during a quick trip from where they were staying in Grenada.
The couple spent an hour walking the perimeter, some of it still untouched jungle, in the pouring rain.
“By the time we got back, I had fallen in love with it,” Braden said.
His wife, however, wasn’t so sure. But in Braden’s telling, a second visit in sunnier weather with two of their children brought her around.
“She had to be talked into that it was a jolly good idea; now she absolutely loves it,” he said.
When they bought the property, the edge that runs along the waterfront was a jungle, so they cleared the ridge and transformed it into gardens.
They also bought an additional sea-level parcel with two beach cottages, giving the property direct access to the water and the town below via a five-minute walk.
The property also has a 15-person staff, a reflecting pond, an outdoor pavilion suitable for yoga and a commercial grade kitchen that can serve more than 100 guests, according to a brochure from Knight Frank, which posted the listing in March. They did not provide further comment.
For Braden, the property is special because of its natural beauty, its proximity to the town of Saint Lucy and its history—which dates way way back to when the island of Barbados was first formed via tectonic activity.
“It was basically tectonic plates that collided about a million years ago so the seabed is the top of the hill,” Braden said. “We’re on coral rock.”
As a result, Fustic Estate includes an extensive network of caves that were likely used by the Arawaks, a Venezuelan fishing tribe that followed the fish to these islands about a thousand years ago.
“If the fish were good they’d camp here,” Braden said. “There’s evidence that they stayed there in those caves, they lived there in good winters.”
Now it’s someone else’s turn to live on the land shared by Arawaks, the plantation owners of 1712, Charles Graves and the Braden brood.
