Reviving rural communities

Despite rising prices and demand for second homes, some experts believe there will be a silver lining when it comes to Covid-19 and the summer property ladder, especially for middle-income, dual-earning couples. This is because the remote-working boom is making it easier to invest in less expensive areas further away from buyers’ base cities.

“We have seen a tendency that more people are searching for homes outside of their county of residence. It is hard to know for certain if this is because of Covid-19, but it is possible that as more people are working from home, proximity to the office becomes less important,” says Staffan Tell at Hemnet.

Julian Stubbs, who runs a global branding agency from Stockholm and is an author and speaker on remote working, believes that will eventually lead to growing numbers of Swedes living in the countryside more permanently.

“I think there’s going to be a trend of people moving out of cities, actually moving to cheaper locations where they can afford a better life,” he says. Although this tendency is also emerging in other countries including the UK and the US, Stubbs believes it will happen at a more rapid pace in Sweden due to high levels of trust between employers and employees, an existing culture of flexible working and a tech-savvy society with strong infrastructure. “Provided you’ve got great broadband, the right kind of services, schools, all the things those new people are going to want moving out the cities, I think remote places could do rather well out of this.”

It’s a prediction Lena Lid Falkman at Stockholm School of Economics agrees with, and one which she hopes will help revive Sweden’s rural communities. But she’s not convinced everyone who’s splashed out on Swedish summer homes in 2020 will embrace countryside living long-term.

“To some extent people will start selling, because there is a difference between going somewhere on holiday and having a summer house,” she explains. “You need to cut the grass. You need to paint. You need to fix the water. So both financially and work-related, some people might get tired of having a holiday home, even though this is a tradition.”

Back in the Stockholm archipelago, writer Dahlberg says she’s also sceptical about Swedes sticking purely to staycations in the future, and suspects those who can afford foreign adventures will start taking them again as travel restrictions ease up.

“I think that this summer has been a nice way to kind of reflect and reconnect with a lot of the beauty that's in Sweden,” she says. “But we'll see what happens if we get a handle on this virus. Maybe the ‘wanderlust’ is just too strong.”

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