Coronavirus has driven me to fantasise even more about moving home

My partner and I have a habit of looking at other properties online – this has become even more rampant during the pandemic but it seems we’re not the only ones considering a new home, writes Holly Baxter

There’s been a countryside exodus with the rise of remote working (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

My fiance and I have a habit of scrolling through property listings on sites like apartments.com, RightMove and Zillow, just to make sure we constantly feel on-edge about all our housing-related decisions. We especially like to do it when we’re bang in the middle of a year-long lease, so we can torture ourselves with what might have been while knowing that there’s absolutely no logistical way we can take advantage of what’s on the screen before us.

So entrenched has this habit become throughout our relationship that we’ve got our own phrase for it: “looking at house porn”. And so regularly do we deploy that phrase that E once turned to me in a crowded subway carriage in Manhattan last year and said, in what can only be described as his ‘outside voice’, “What did you think of that porn I sent you earlier?” No wonder Republicans think that the liberal media elites in New York City are contributing to the moral decline of the nation.

Those above us in the food chain have been fleeing the city altogether for nice houses with back yards and home offices

Our house-porn scrolling has become even more urgent in the past few weeks as the coronavirus pandemic continued to hit the five boroughs of NYC especially hard. Our windowless box in a halfway decent area of Brooklyn, where our bed backs on to our oven, used to be a steal. It’s a rent-controlled building, after all. But now full one-bedroom apartments in the same area are going for less; even two-beds with such crazy amenities as roof gardens, pools, in-building gyms and in-apartment washing machines are within our reach in areas nearby. Trapped in our lease until April, we keep scrolling through the deals – “24-month lease with six months free!”, “Move in tomorrow and get a personally delivered sack of diamonds and 200 Bitcoins!” – and agreeing with each other how foolish we are to have not lived in a doorway for the last seven months so we could take advantage of them.

Interestingly, however, we’re not the only ones with moving on the mind. There’s an urban/suburban divide in America at the moment – and it’s not the one we were all focused on during the election.

As much as people like us are looking to move into slightly nicer apartments in Manhattan and Brooklyn, those above us in the food chain have been fleeing the city altogether for nice houses with back yards and home offices. Their companies have gone fully remote, their kids have been bouncing off the walls of their small apartments, and they now live in quaint little suburban towns with names like Schenectady or Tarrytown — or in the middle of the wilderness upstate, where their previously cosseted tykes can run around in forests and fields. Consequently, plummeting rents in the city have been balanced out by skyrocketing prices on homes in the ’burbs (or, as Americans say, the boonies.) 

I have a friend whose parents sold their suburban home just before the pandemic, moved into temporary rented accommodation and now can’t afford to buy back a home of the same calibre as the one they sold. I have another friend who, bored of being stuck in New York City and with perhaps a little too much time on his hands, has decided to buy a “project” upstate to travel to on the weekends and “do up”. No doubt city tinkerers like him are also guilty of jacking up the prices in the sleepier parts of New York state.

For now, E and I remain encased in The Box with our mad cat and an infuriatingly accurate knowledge of the housing market. Come April, however, we plan to be the first to snap up a 2,000sq ft warehouse conversion — so long as positive news of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines this week don’t tempt nervous young families back to Manhattan.