Work from home: Zoom Towns in the Albuquerque area

(Transcript Snippet): “Tego:

Speaking of which Tracy something else. It was, uh, on my list for topics this week. Although I didn’t, I didn’t, uh, give it into summary to Eddie was there’s been a lot of research around work from home work from home, obviously after, you know, the last year and a half has become much more prominent. And there’s a lot of, uh, you know, uh, HR type companies like Upwork and different entities that deal with, uh, hiring and employees. And they feel like a lot of the research is pointing to that. The work from home thing is, is here to stay. It’s going to be much more common and much more viable going forward.

Tracy:

I think not only is it here to stay that they’re expected it continuing to expand, right? Obviously there’s lots of professions where you have to go in. Right? Think about all the places we visit during the day, whether it’s a store or a restaurant or a hospital or a medical facility, or, I mean, they need people in the office, but so many businesses have adapted and adapted really well that they’re expanding it. Long-term.

Tego:

Yeah. And I, I, you know, honestly, and this is just me speculating, but I think it bodes well for communities like Albuquerque. Um, there was a term floating around last year. It’s still out there called zoom towns. So zoom towns where we’re, where people that lived in crowded cities in like the west let’s say, and they just, they don’t, they, they can work from wherever. They don’t need to go into an office. And so some of these towns like Boise, Idaho is kinda like the, the, the prime example of where they’re calling it a zoom town where, where people can go the Fort, you know, it’s a lot less affordable or excuse me, much more affordable than let’s say San Francisco in that example to go to Boise. And, um, I think we’re seeing some of that here. I don’t think it’s huge, but I do. I do think we see some people coming into Albuquerque. It’s affordable to own a home here compared to other Western cities and they can work from anywhere. They love the climate, they love the balloons. Right. You know, so it’s, I think we’re going to see more of that where people live here, but don’t necessarily work here. If that makes sense.

Tracy:

I think that’s true. We’ve seen several of those in our real estate business this past year.

Tego:

I have no data to back that up. I’m just speculating how’s that I always got to put those caveats in there. Cause I like to be honest with,

Tracy:

We, haven’t had a few, uh, a few clients we’ve worked with who are that way that they’re choosing, you know, I can think of a few right off the top of my head who have bought here, but are remote working now. And you know, you think about our son he’s in the Phoenix area and he chose his employer out of college because he wanted that experience to be at their headquarters, even though a lot of his coworkers were all over the world. And so he had his first year they’re in, in the office and getting to see what that was like being a business person, going to work. And now he’s worked from home. And I think, you know, we had this conversation, um, with somebody, uh, this week and they were saying that the workplaces of the future for those people, that companies that have huge facilities that are sitting empty mostly right now that they’re converting spaces to be more like the coffee shop, the meeting space so that they will still have some, in-person get togethers just for the social interaction of it. But yeah, but nobody’s probably ever going to work in those offices again, like they had. And that’s, this is a really big company we were talking about. They have a lot of, uh, hard space, right. A lot of

Tego:

Hi, very high dollar space in very high dollar city was too. Yeah. I rent city. So yeah. It’s interesting. So yeah, we’re going to see how that shakes out. Um, I wouldn’t want to be a huge a holder of, uh, office commercial real estate right now, but I’m sure, you know, it’s, it depends on the market, I would guess.

Tracy:

And you know, you, you see the national news about New York city and how business services are moving back in there. So who knows we could be wrong. It wouldn’t be the first,

Tego:

It would not, it would definitely not.