Bay Area residents buying Tahoe-Truckee real estate
By Pete Carey, San Jose Mercury News
The Bay Area’s economic recovery is sparking a surge of vacation home sales in the Lake Tahoe-Truckee mountain playground.
“Two or three years ago, nobody was buying houses, period,” said Patience Lewis, a Coldwell Banker agent in the Tahoe-Truckee area. “Now it’s like the floodgates have opened.”
In the first half of the year, Bay Area buyers helped drive second-home sales in the region to their highest level since 2005, according to the real estate company DataQuick. About a third of the region’s vacation-home buyers this year live in the Bay Area, a DataQuick analysis for this newspaper shows.
Fueled by tech’s spreading wealth and lured by the region’s pristine summer and winter beauty, the buyers range from families with young children snapping up condominiums in ski resorts at bargain prices to multimillionaires from Silicon Valley acquiring expensive lakefront estates.