I'm interest to know why you think Starlink would disrupt real estate? Do you think more people will move to rural areas if they had access to high speed internet there?
It's not all positive though. It really helps to have a dedicated home office.
Yes. My wife and I started looking at buying land in mid-2020 and saw a handful of plots we were interested in. What stopped us from committing to buying one was internet service because we're both remote workers who require at least 50/10 mbit for both of us to be working without issue.
In the present it is fairly straightforward to get around no power, no water and no sewages with solar, well and septic system. If you don't have internet service though there's not much you can do to get around that.
Starlink has changed that. I suspect we'll also see an uprise in prefabricated homes as well. I want to live further out to escape the city, have a family garden, and a couple chickens but I don't want to have to build our home by hand.
I'd choose that rural public school experience every time over public schools in all US cities. It was safe (a school shooting was unthinkable), zero gang or weapon problems, the focus was always on education, classes were never too crowded (easy to get individual attention from a teacher as needed), and the teachers were great overall (90% older women with decades of experience). Toward the end of my years in that public school system, drug use did begin to infest rural American schools and you could see that was about to get a lot worse. The US has changed a lot in the past 30 years, I suspect my experience is becoming increasingly rare, but there are likely still a lot of nice rural areas (it's a huge country after all).
Here is some content as not everyone has the opportunity to do this.
I work in software and she's transitioning into software as well. We could live a above comfortable lifestyle on my salary or a comfortable lifestyle on her salary.
The plan has been to build up our investment portfolio where yields cover the minimum to survive by the age of 35. This is to reduce the risk relying of the bulk of income coming from a single source.
At that point in time I'd consider looking for part time, freelance or consulting to be able to transition my primary focus into our family but also to reduce the chance of dipping into the yields from the portfolio.
With the freed up time I would homeschool and bring the children to activities for social interaction.
I don't think this environment would negatively impact them.
I'm not far from a big city, and closer still to a small town. Property prices in that town have gone insane during the pandemic. People want their own space. With remote work and good internet, any town can see a boom. If this pandemic had happened once Starlink was fully operational, it would have really changed some of those numbers, I think.
Early last year, slightly before the pandemic, we decided to make the permanent move out of the SF bay area. In fact, when the pandemic hit in February, we were in Oregon looking at a property.
Prior to that, we were planning on waiting until Starlink became a thing, but decided to push forward without it, with the requirement that the new place have high speed Internet.
We made a big spreadsheet and put almost 500 properties in it. The very first thing was to check its Internet speed. My wife spent...many many hours...on the phone with xfinity and a couple of others, going through addresses.
When we found this place, the first thing we had our on-site agent do was get the wifi password and run a couple of speed tests. We required that prior to even being (remotely) shown around.
We are out in the country here, so there are power and Internet outages, but not too frequent. I did signup for and get a Starlink dish, and it acts as our secondary Internet connection in case comcast is out. It's connected to one of our generator backed up circuits.
From what we've heard over the seven months we've been here, property prices are going up all over Thurston county. The contractors we've had in tell us that there are TONS of people like us, largely from the SF bay area, arriving....people with money they're willing to spend.
for some the need to feel like they are in the center of everything is the primary requirement and what I see as detracting from the experience is just background noise that they may not even notice.
We ended up moving after a year solely because of the internet.
At least for me, Starlink would have been a game changer.