Richard ‘Abundant’ Barton, co-founder and CEO of Zillow Inc.
Andrew Harrer | Bloomberg | Getty Images
The U.S. real estate market is beginning to exhibit signs of a “great reshuffling,” as people relocate to homes with more privacy and space to ease working from welcoming comfortable with, Zillow CEO Rich Barton said on the company’s Q2 2020 earnings call this week.
“I believe we are at the dawn of a capacious reshuffling,” Barton said. “I’m sure I don’t need to spell it out for you because we are all living it, spending an average of nine hours numerous per day at home. Zoom meetings are changing the way families think about space and privacy. Home offices are in high require. Backyards are more desirable than parks and gyms. Work-from-home policies are eliminating the commute for many. There’s an uninterrupted list of considerations.”
Millions of people are considering moves for a slew of reasons, mostly to right-size their living organizes or get closer to family, he added. With some employers not expecting to bring workers back into the office until there’s a Covid-19 vaccine, the work-from-home usual could last several more months.
Companies could also fundamentally change how they want wage-earners in the office. Zillow will offer its employees the option to work remotely at least part-time indefinitely, while Simper and Atlassian have both said employees can work from home indefinitely.
The pandemic also has accelerated tendencies of people fleeing large, expensive U.S. cities. While home shopping is up everywhere, Barton said the company is foretelling a “deceleration of migration” to cities and expects it to continue.
“We are pretty confident that this is going to be a lasting, multiyear consequential trend,” Barton said. “We can’t call exactly how it’s going to play out from the data yet. But from an intuition supported by some bit of evidence, it seems like something real.”
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