Tahoe’s real estate market maintained a healthy momentum this summer, with a few new twists.

Buyers this summer were more selective, favoring turnkey homes at more balanced price points, an indicator of a healthy correction of the previous pandemic-fueled frenzy. Luxury homes around the basin sold at remarkably similar prices and rates to last summer, and federal tax incentives drew in buyers hoping to generate revenue from their properties.

In South Lake Tahoe, Reed Dickert, broker owner of Freshwater Realty, said everything from old homes to new construction sold for around $900,000 to $1.3 million this summer, a narrower range than previous years. In the pandemic, the same houses could have gone for $1.5-1.7 million, he said. 

Ryan Smith, a realtor at Compass in South Lake Tahoe, said anything $700,000 and under was “knocking it out of the park” this summer, but he estimated the average price in the South Lake Tahoe market was around $1.1 million.

The luxury sector remained remarkably consistent with last summer’s sales, brokers said. At Casa Tua, Sabrina Belleci’s Incline Village-based brokerage, she said the median price of a single-family home hovered around $2.3 million both last summer and this summer. 

Amie Quirarte, a luxury real estate broker with Serhant covering the north and west shores, also said her sales were essentially the same from last summer to this one.

Buyers are getting pickier

Since the market has cooled off post-COVID, Quirarte said buyers also don’t have the same “rapid decision-making” that dominated the Tahoe real estate boom.

Quirarte said this is generally a good thing because a lot of buyers who were forced to snap up the first property they could get their hands on ended up selling a few years later. Now, they can afford to be “a bit more choosy,” she said.

People were looking for houses with gorgeous lake views and lake access through docks, piers and private beaches this summer, Quirarte said. But more than anything, buyers didn’t want homes that required any extra work after purchase.

“People are wanting something that’s just simple,” Quirarte said. “Sign on the dotted line, grab your toothbrush, come up and enjoy your house.”

Dickert, too, saw a drive for property that “has no questions about it,” but he saw this as a reaction to the financial strain of purchasing a home. Anything with a broken deck or the need for a remodel was a harder sell. 

Belleci said many of her buyers this summer had remote jobs and were looking to move to the basin long term or find their “forever Tahoe place.” They tended to tour more homes before making a decision.

“They have more time to really find the right place for them,” Belleci said, comparing it to buyers who are moving for a job or putting their kids in school.

How data-driven buyers correct pricing

Smith, the South Lake Tahoe realtor, said buyers are much more savvy, understand the market better and have more data than ever before. He said well-priced houses were flying off the market this summer, but there was a slimmer margin of error in pricing.

“If you’re 30 grand overpriced, you don’t get calls,” Smith said. “I think that buyers are helping sellers correct.”

Murat Gocmen, the broker and co-owner of Real Estate Tahoe, said the rise of artificial intelligence, specifically ChatGPT, has made data significantly more accessible to people. 

Rather than sifting through hard-to-reach google results, buyers will ask for market reports from ChatGPT that are accurate enough to be useful, Gocmen said.

Part of that numbers game is interest rates, which climbed to 7% this summer, nearly triple what they were at their trough in the pandemic. These high rates stagnated a segment of sellers who are holding onto their pandemic-era 2-3% interest rate mortgages. 

Buyers who are looking to finance their purchase couldn’t afford what they could a few years ago, the South Lake Tahoe broker Dickert said, essentially making the “finance player” much less competitive than those with cash.

For wealthy cash buyers, rising interest rates didn’t affect their deals, leaving much of the lake’s inventory unaffected, one of the reasons for the basin’s overall price stability.

Debate over the impact of vacation rental permits

In South Lake Tahoe, Smith said “the main character in the story” this summer was vacation rental permits.

The City of South Lake Tahoe opened up 900 vacation home rental permits for the first time since voters approved Measure T in 2018. In March, a judge ruled the measure was unconstitutional and the city opened up the new permits in April.

Gocmen rejected the idea that these permits had any real effect on the market in South Lake Tahoe, saying the supply was too unreliable for people to buy a home solely to turn it into a vacation rental. Smith argued the permits attracted an untapped buyer pool looking to turn their homes into a source of revenue.

Gocmen said the city’s lack of transparency about the queue for permits plus the limited number available in the first place stifled any larger trend from taking root. 

Dickert said he wasn’t sure the permits had much of an impact on his sales in South Lake, and that in general he thinks renting properties longer term, or even seasonally, is easier and more profitable.

As of Aug. 21, all 900 vacation rental permits were taken and the city began waitlisting new applicants.

Tax incentives influence buyers

What those in the real estate industry agreed on, however, was the impact of the bonus depreciation tax incentive from President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. 

The incentive allows people who buy income-generating properties to write off 100% of the property’s depreciation on their taxes, and it guarantees that the owner will continue to be able to write the depreciation off at 100% each year.

Gocmen, Belleci, Smith and Quirarte all cited the bonus depreciation tax incentive as a major driver in this summer’s real estate market. Though the incentive has been in effect since January 2025, Tahoe’s buyers don’t know how long the incentive will last.

The biggest sector influenced by the tax incentive was those who had been looking to buy a Tahoe home for a while, Belleci said.

“I think it pushed them to do that sooner rather than later,” she said.

Limitations for luxury sales

The luxury market was still hot this summer, but a few new challenges came into play.

Quirarte said she saw a slowdown on the California side of the lakefront market, especially considering the high volume in that same region last year. She attributed that pause to the uncertainty of California’s proposed wealth tax which voters will approve or deny in November. 

“Luxury high-end buyers are uncomfortable with uncertainty,” Quirarte said. “I anticipate that once there’s an answer to [the wealth tax], whether it’s passing or not, we’ll see a bit more traction coming back into our market.”

She also said Bay Area buyers could be holding out on purchasing a home until artificial intelligence powerhouses OpenAI and Anthropic go public on the stock market — which is anticipated by the end of the year — causing a huge influx in cash among their investors. 

Belleci said she suspects some buyers were discouraged by headlines about the ultrarich buying properties in Tahoe. Last December, Google Co-founder Sergey Brin bought a $42 million lakefront estate in Crystal Bay. 

Belleci’s numbers exclude massive off-market deals that went through earlier this year — including one $125 million deal — and made up more of Belleci’s overall sales than last year. She said about a quarter of her sales this summer were off market, compared with 15% last summer. 

Incline Village prices have “more staying power,” not because the properties there are better but because of the country club-esque feel in the community, Belleci said. This, in turn, makes sellers less willing to negotiate or drop prices.

The special summer sauce

Summer is generally characterized as the busy season in Tahoe’s real estate market. People are in town from all over California and the western United States, and they start visualizing what it would be like to own a home here. 

Dickert said that while homes still sell in the winter to the ski crowd once it starts to snow, in the summer, “it’s absolutely gorgeous here.” Historically, that drives sales up in May through September, he said.

While enjoying the Tahoe summer on vacation, Quirarte agreed that “the desire to have your own place is a little bit stronger.” When people return to their routines at their primary residences, Tahoe slips from the forefront of their minds.

Buyers are never more motivated, Quirarte said, than when they’re “enjoying the magicalness of Tahoe summer.”