JOAN LYNCH, June 19, 2025
San Luis Obispo County has never been a cheap place to live compared to the rest of California or the United States, but in an era of stagnant interest rates and home costs approaching $1 million across the county, a new group of homeowners is growing: the millionaire class.
According to a new market analysis by data aggregator RentCafe, the number of homes belonging to millionaires exploded from just 22 to 405 between 2019 and 2023 — increasing by 1,700% in a four-year window.
This rapid acceleration in the number of millionaire owners has made San Luis Obispo County one of the fastest-growing locations for millionaire homeownership in the United States, with only Salt Lake City, Utah, Orlando, Florida, and Pensacola, Florida showing faster demographic growth in that time, according to the analysis.
But while the county’s median home price of $942,050 as of April was attainable to just 11% of the county’s households, according to the California Association of Realtors, home prices aren’t the only thing attracting more millionaires to the Central Coast.
Christie’s International Real Estate Sereno Realtor Lindsey Harn said the past five years have seen a demographic shift in who’s buying homes in San Luis Obispo County — and why.
“There’s really something for everyone, and so if someone’s trying to kind of get out of that hectic pace, we become this pretty important place for those people,” Harn said. “We’re attractive to them.”
How SLO County homes became millionaire-friendly
Of the millionaire clients she’s helped find homes in San Luis Obispo County, around 50% were from out of the county, with the majority of buyers falling between the ages of 40 and 65, Harn said.
Though the county’s premium location has always elevated housing costs compared to the rest of California, prior to 2019 most of the housing in San Luis Obispo County wasn’t exactly catered to the standards of the highest earners, Harn said.
“There’s a lot of these builders building $2.5, $3, $4 million spec homes, custom homes, and we didn’t have that pre-2019 — it’s kind of this new phenomenon where we’re getting, again, a more attractive product that attracts these higher-net-worth people,” Harn said. “They could love San Luis, but if they can’t live somewhere where they’re comfortable — now we’re seeing more housing styles that can accommodate people from different levels of expectation.”
Harn pointed to new homes under construction in the La Vineda and Anza Estates developments as examples of some of this refocusing of priorities by local builders.
“Our quality of construction has kind of been behind some of the places where these folks are coming from like Orange County, LA, San Francisco — they tend to spend more money on remodels and higher quality cabinets, higher quality windows than a typical San Luis owner,” Harn said. “These 20 or 30 new lots that have been released and snatched up (are) kind of giving people an opportunity to build and expand the type of housing they’re used to.”
Rising prices in cities — and the stress sometimes inherent to living in them — have also made high-earning buyers more receptive to living in locations like San Luis Obispo County that has plenty of access to major cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Combined with the explosion of hybrid and remote work during and after the COVID-19 pandemic and recent expansions to the San Luis Obispo County Regional Airport, suddenly the county could check plenty of boxes for high-income potential homeowners that it could not previously, Harn said.
Millionaires choosing to rent more often — but not in SLO County
Though the idea of making more than a million dollars a year and homeownership may go hand in hand for many, in truth the number of millionaires choosing to rent is higher than ever before, according to the RentCafe analysis.
Nationwide, the number of renter households with an annual income of $1 million or more grew from 4,500 to 13,700, according to the analysis. For comparison, that’s a 204% escalation in millionaire-renter households between 2019 and 2023, while in that same time millionaire-owner homes increased by 169%, or from 52,966 to 142,320 households, according to the analysis.
But in San Luis Obispo County, that’s far from the case, Harn said.
While the housing market has actively made room for the wants and financial capacities of higher-income buyers, the rental market generally doesn’t boast the same features and amenities that tend to sweeten the pot for those buyers, Harn said.
Avila Beach is one of the few San Luis Obispo County locales with the mix of location, features, quality and rent prices consistently in the range that the highest earners would want, she said.
“We don’t really have a rental market, let’s say, above eight to 10 grand — we don’t really have renters that run in that price range, and we don’t really have rentals,” Harn said. “The only time I’ve really seen millionaires rent is if they have to be here for a job transfer or they really want to try the area on for size — there’s a lot of $3,000 to $5,000 rentals, but those typically aren’t going to appeal to this kind of higher net worth.”
Article originally published by The Tribune.