# Location always matters

By [Brandon Donnelly](https://brandondonnelly.com) · 2022-03-26

apartment-rents, central-city-real-estate, housing, housing-survey, location, manhattan, new-york-city, office-utilization, rbc-home-ownership-pool, real-estate, urban-housing

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[Well this is interesting](https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/home-buying-attitude-back-to-pre-pandemic-levels-rbc-survey-1.1740775), yet not surprising: According to RBC's annual "Home Ownership Poll", three out of every five respondents (so nearly 60%) said that _location_ is more important than buying a larger home. Now, there's only so much you can glean from a single survey question, but the overarching sense is that people's home-buying attitudes are now starting to revert back to pre-pandemic levels.

Other evidence includes how quickly urban residential rents/prices have bounced back and, in many cases, now exceed their pre-pandemic levels. Below is a chart from the WSJ showing residential net-effective median rent prices in Manhattan. The low came in November 2020 when the median rent price hit $2,743 per month. But today it is well over $3,500, which is the highest it has been in a decade.

https://twitter.com/donnelly\_b/status/1506451164937789441?s=20&t=wCqayRJY2vmf9kTNJ3A4QQ

Certain aspects of how we will continue to live and work in our cities is admittedly still evolving ([see my recent post on office utilization](https://brandondonnelly.com/2022/03/03/office-utilization-update/)). But part of our pandemic narrative was that location was no longer going to matter, or at least not matter nearly as much. [New York City, to give just one example, had died forever](https://brandondonnelly.com/2020/08/24/new-york-city-isnt-dead/). But that was obviously bullshit. And what we are seeing in the residential space is an important leading indicator. Location always matters.

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*Originally published on [Brandon Donnelly](https://brandondonnelly.com/location-always-matters)*