Bedrooms, Bathrooms & Broadband

As many rural communities continue to grow, local real estate agents have noticed a new question is frequently on the mind of potential home buyers: Can I get broadband here?

According to a 2022 study from McKinsey & Company, nearly 58% of U.S. workers are able to work remotely part or full time. The growth of remote opportunities is not only changing the commute of many employees, it’s also changed their living situations.

Many buyers are choosing to ditch a faster-paced city life and move past the suburbs to rural America. A 2022 Upwork survey reported in Forbes magazine mentioned about “9.3%, or roughly 18.9 million Americans, are planning to move because of remote work, compared to 6.1% in October 2020.”

Moving to a rural community is a trend Tennessee real estate agents are seeing, including Jackie Siler, a broker with Fuller Partners Real Estate in Martin, an area served by fast fiber internet from WK&T.

“Everybody needs fast internet and a lot of the country homes don’t have anything but satellite,” Siler says. “That makes the buyer completely cross that house off the list. When people are working from home and kids are doing school work, they need high-speed internet. Usually they assume the answer is going to be no, but they’re extremely happy when they learn the internet speeds they can get out of town.”

Siler has also seen a growth in demand after COVID-19.

“Since COVID-19, everybody is working from home,” she says. “In the last three or four years, it seems like everybody wants to get out into the country, and one of the main questions you get is whether the house has high-speed internet.”

The Fiber Homes website has integrated with the Tennessee Valley Realtors Association to better equip real estate agents for questions from buyers.

“There’s a huge demand for high-speed internet,” Siler says. “People need more and more bandwidth to do their work, even farmers need Wi-Fi for their tractors. They’re very few people who don’t care about high-speed internet.”