You haven’t lived in Medellin, Colombia if you don’t think digital nomads can have an effect on housing prices.

My experience is from 2015-2024. I did the digital nomad thing for 9 years and lived in Medellin 4 separate times over that period for 6 months to a year each time.

I saw rents for normal folks, not furnished and not Airbnbs, do a 4x in that time period. Laureles was a middle class suburb for locals in 2015 and was just overrun by nomads by 2024. Poblado, Laureles, even as far as La Estrella saw a really noticeable impact.

Clearly I contributed to the issue and nomads did inject money into the economy but it also had a really visible effect on housing. I don’t have any ideas on how to do it right but it is something that should be approached carefully or locals get priced out.

EDIT: I believe they started more tightly regulating things in 2024 with required registration for <1 year rentals. Not sure how that has played out. Also added the specific neighborhoods that I saw things shoot up.

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ks2048 2 hours ago | parent [-]

How do you assign changes to: “nomads”, expats, retirees, and even local gentrification?

	▲	alemanek an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		My social circle was largely nomads when I lived there so I was very aware of CoLiving, CoWork, and other business almost exclusively catering to nomads. Those exploded in number during this time period. Poblado was already one of the richest neighborhoods in the whole country in 2015. One of my neighbors was an Emmy winning pianist. So, gentrification isn’t going to be a thing in neighborhood like that. It is a single data point of my lived experience in that part of the world. I am not presenting it as a peer reviewed study. But, there are also examples like Portugal which has had more recent studies done on this.
	▲	prmoustache 42 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		s/expats/migrants/