Fewer and fewer Leelanau County homebuyers actually hail from northern Michigan.

That’s the key takeaway local realtor Jonathan Oltersdorf got from his annual deep dive into real estate transaction data. Since 2007, Oltersdorf has been selling houses in Leelanau County through his family’s firm, Suttons Bay-based Oltersdorf Realty. A few years ago, he started putting together exhaustive reports that tabulate end-of-the-year metrics, ranging from homes sold to how many of those houses are waterfront properties.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Oltersdorf has been particularly fascinated with where people buying homes in Leelanau are coming from. With COVID and the rise of remote work, millions of Americans were untethered from big cities for the first time in their adult lives. As The Ticker has documented in recent years, northern Michigan has been a big magnet for many of those folks, something Oltersdorf has seen clearly in the data.

Two years ago, the Leelanau Ticker sat down with Oltersdorf to wade through the numbers. At the time, then-fresh data from 2022 indicated that roughly 45 percent of that year’s 334 homebuyers were local. In 2024, the number of homes sold (338) was nearly identical, but Oltersdorf’s data shows that only 40 percent of buyers hailed from Leelanau or Grand Traverse counties.

The data isn’t perfect, Oltersdorf admits. It’s based on buyer zip codes, which typically (though, not always) indicate their most recent prior place of residence. Oltersdorf then builds bar graphs, heat maps, and other charts to visualize where buyers are coming from. The methodology considers buyers with previous addresses in Leelanau or Grand Traverse County as locals, and anyone else as non-locals.

Even allowing for a margin of error, Oltersdorf says the data paints a clear trend: The number of locals buying homes in Leelanau County is dropping every single year.

Pre-pandemic, in 2019, 54.9 percent of the 467 homes sold in Leelanau County  went to buyers with Leelanau or Grand Traverse County addresses. By 2022, that number had dropped 10 percentage points, with only 44.9 percent of the county’s 334 home sales (about 150 houses) going to local buyers. In 2024, just 40 percent of buyers were local, accounting for 135 of last year’s 338 sales.

COVID accelerated the trend, but Oltersdorf says the shift dates back even further. In 2014 and 2015, local buyers were scooping up nearly two-thirds of all Leelanau real estate. The percentage has dipped every year since, falling below 60 percent in 2018 and dropping below 50 percent in 2021. If the trend line continues, 2025 will be the first year where local buyers account for less than 40 percent of the homes sold in Leelanau County.

So what’s driving the shift?

“I think it's a combination of a lot of things,” Oltersdorf says. “Some of it is the post-COVID work-from-home mentality. Some of it is just affordability; the market here has gradually priced out a lot of the local people. The age demographics in Leelanau County are also increasing, which typically brings in older homebuyers who might be retiring here from other places.”

Oltersdorf also theorizes that northern Michigan’s habit of showing up on high-profile lists of the best places to live or visit has brought “a growing interest in Leelanau County real estate from a broader national audience.”

The majority of buyers are still coming from inside the state: last year, 68.9 percent of Leelanau’s buyers were from Michigan. But that percentage is dipping too, down from 80.5 percent a decade ago. And while other Midwestern cities account for a lot of the outside-of-Michigan-to-Leelanau pipeline – Oltersdorf’s heat map shows clusters of buyers from driving-distance cities like Chicago, Columbus, Cincinnati, and Indianapolis – the map also indicates notable migration trends from cities further west, including San Francisco, Phoenix, Denver, Houston, and Dallas.

On an affordability level, Leelanau’s declining percentage of local buyers correlates almost directly with increasing price points. The median home sale price in Leelanau County has gone up every year in the past decade, rising from $285,000 in 2015 to $609,500 in 2024. The average sale price has mostly followed an upward trend, too, jumping from $354,055 in 2015 to $833,707 last year.

Of course, Leelanau isn’t the only part of the country that’s been subject to a rising tide of real estate prices – something Oltersdorf says is reflected in a worrying national stat.

“Nationally, the average age of a homebuyer last year was 56 years old,” Oltersdorf tells the Leelanau Ticker. “In 2023, the average age was 49. The average age jumped seven years just between 2023 and 2024, which is a record. The median age for first-time homebuyers in the United States right now is 38. I’m guessing those numbers are going to get even higher. All across the country, affordability – or lack thereof – is basically pricing out people in their 20s and 30s [from buying homes]. And that’s especially true in Leelanau County.”

One data point that seems to be holding relatively steady in Leelanau? The percentage of residential parcels in the county with a principal residence exemption. Despite fears locally that more and more housing stock will end up in the hands of investors or snow birds, Oltersdorf says the data doesn’t support that notion yet.

“The percentage of primary homes in Leelanau County has consistently been 45-47%, going back 15 years,” Oltersdorf says. “What that means is we're not seeing a lot of primary homes turned into second homes, vacation homes, or short-term rentals (STRs). We’re retaining primary homes, even as the buyers change.”