Wyoming’s wide open spaces have become a draw for people who are seeking to get out of the crowded urban areas that have become hot spots for COVID-19, according to several realtors.
Matt Hall, Cody’s mayor and a realtor for Western Real Estate, said the market has become much busier in the last few months.
“We’re having a hard place finding rentals, which we’ve always struggled with in Cody,” he explains. “But also, any houses that are in town, especially in the downtown corridor, they’re getting sucked up almost immediately.”
Mike Fraley is a realtor with Hall and Hall in Buffalo. His territory covers much of Wyoming and Southern Montana, with an emphasis on ranch properties. Fraley said high-end land sales have spiked since late March.
“The first part of April, not just in Wyoming, but in Montana and the Colorado brokers as well, we all started getting this inclination that we may have a different market emerge out of this,” he said. “You know, I picked up three different clients, three different private jets, and those were the kinds of buyers that were emerging.”
But Hall added that some of the interest in Cody in particular could also have been sparked by the move to the community by Kanye West.
“It’s certainly a correlation,” he said, “between the fact that we’ve had some new industry coming to town and that the market is actually doing quite well.”
And Fraley pointed out that while the market is hot right now, there’s no telling what could happen this fall.
“We are in a really good market today,” he said. “I don’t think any of us know what could happen this fall, with the election coming on and just so many things, the chaos going on across the country right now. “I tell sellers, we know what the market’s doing today, and let’s try to capture some of that, because in six months it could be a completely different story.”
