With that title, I thought you were asking about county differences, like coming from a place where county governments have power. In that case, I'd say it doesn't matter, counties have almost no power here.

But a market prediction? Everyone buying now must think it will at least hold. Many more people want to buy. Supply/demand supports these prices. We're just starting to see some slackening, some price reductions. But after 2008, Vermont's housing prices mostly paused instead of decreased.

I think it needs to come down but won't without significant intervention. The share of single family homes owned by investors has tripled in VT, while rising less in other states. The proliferation of short term rentals takes away from our housing supply. Vermont has one of the highest shares of unoccupied homes. According to the Census, in 2021, there were almost 65,000 of these housing units that are used for profit or vacation instead of housing! People talk about construction, but that takes a long time and even if we were doing it faster it would take decades to build as many units are we already have sitting on the sidelines. We need to stop the conversion of existing housing into investments, and use policy to compel many of those to switch back into owner occupied or long term rental.

We already have one way to do this with the homestead property tax differentiation. Clearly short term rentals make enough money to overcome their higher taxes. We could simply increase the tax differential until we see enough of those short term and unoccupied units being switched to long term occupancy.