What does my Herriman home buy in St. George?

What your Herriman home buys in St. George comes down to three numbers most people have not worked out yet. This is the question I get more than any other.

Not one number. Three. And the gap between the optimistic version and the real version is usually where the disappointment lives.

For the non-financial side of the same move, see moving to St. George from Salt Lake City.

If you are moving between the two markets, can I use my Salt Lake realtor to buy in St. George is the practical question that follows.

The three numbers that decide it

One: what your Herriman house actually sells for. Not what a website estimates. Not what your neighbor got last spring. Here are the current Herriman figures, dated and sourced. What a buyer will pay for your specific house, in its specific condition, on your specific street, right now.

Two: what is left after selling. This is the number people skip. Your payoff, commissions, and the closing costs nobody thinks about until they are staring at a settlement statement. The difference between your sale price and the check you actually walk away with surprises almost everyone the first time.

Three: what that remainder buys down here — in the specific city you want, not the county average. St. George and Hurricane are not interchangeable, and I wrote about exactly that in is Hurricane cheaper than St. George.

Get all three and you have an answer. Get one and you have a guess.

What people usually get wrong

They compare sale price to purchase price. Those are not the two numbers that matter. Net proceeds to purchase price is the comparison, and net is always lower than people expect.

They assume southern Utah is simply cheaper. Sometimes. It depends entirely on the city you want and the kind of house you want in it. Trading a newer Herriman house for a similar newer house in a desirable Washington County neighborhood is not automatically a windfall.

They forget the house they want is not the house they have. Most people moving down here also want something different — single level, a shop, a casita, a view, less yard. Every one of those changes the math, and they rarely change it downward.

What the trade tends to buy you

The reliable win is usually not a bigger house. It is one of these:

• Less mortgage. Same size house, meaningfully smaller payment, sometimes none at all.
• The lot you could not get up north — RV parking, a shop, real space.
• Single level. Enormous demand, and it is easier to find down here — though Santa Clara and Ivins are the hardest places to find one.
• The location premium — closer to the red rock, or a view you would pay a fortune for anywhere else.

Which of those you get depends on which you actually prioritize. Trying to get all four is where the plan usually breaks.

The part that is not about money

The hard part of this move is almost never the market. It is the gap between selling your house and closing on the next one — and the fear of ending up with neither. That is a solvable problem with four or five standard approaches, each with a real cost, and it is covered properly in sell without being stranded.

I still work Herriman and the south valley, so both ends of this are mine to manage. There’s more on how that runs on the selling up north page.

The costs that eat the difference

People run this comparison on list prices and are disappointed by the result, because the gap between two prices is not the money that reaches you.

What your Herriman house actually nets. Not its value minus the loan balance — that is equity. The payoff includes interest to the day it is paid, and then commission, title and escrow, recording, prorated property taxes and any concessions come out. What you actually get when you sell walks through every line, and the figure is reliably lower than owners expect.

The move itself. Several hundred miles, and the costs of setting up a household again.

The carrying period, if the two closings do not line up. That gap is the real risk rather than the price, and it deserves a plan rather than optimism.

What the southern house costs to run. Cooling is a genuine monthly cost here, and it depends heavily on the age and specification of the house. What utility bills look like is the honest version, and a cheap house with an old cooling system is not cheap.

Insurance and HOA. Both worth quoting on specific addresses rather than assuming, and HOA coverage varies a lot across the county.

The sequencing question, which costs the most

Sell first and you know your number but may need somewhere to live. Buy first and you are carrying two properties.

Neither is automatically right, and the answer depends on your equity position, your tolerance for carrying cost and how tight the timeline is. Whether to sell first or buy first here is the honest treatment, and whether you can buy down south before selling up north covers the mechanics — a contingent offer, a bridge loan, or a rent-back.

What I would not do is start touring down south before you have a realistic net figure for the northern house. That number is your down payment, and a plan built on equity rather than net proceeds is a plan that comes up short.

What the trade actually buys, beyond square footage

The honest answer is climate and pace rather than size.

You are trading a real winter for a mild one and a hot summer for a warm one. You are trading a large, varied metropolitan job market for a narrower one, which barely matters if you are retired or remote and matters enormously otherwise. You are trading proximity to whoever you know up north for proximity to red rock.

Some households find that an obviously good deal. Others discover in year two that the people were the point. Whether St. George suits retirement is the fuller version of that question, and it deserves answering before the spreadsheet does.

Run the numbers on both ends before you let a listing decide anything, and run them on real addresses rather than on medians.

I am Kelsey Earl, a Realtor with Keller Williams South Valley, and the households who make this move well are the ones who ran the net figure first. The ones who ran it on list prices arrive disappointed.

What to do next

Send me your address. I will price your Herriman house properly — three defensible numbers, not one — and show you what the net actually buys in each of the five cities down here, using real listings rather than a median.

If the trade does not work yet, I will tell you that. It is a better thing to hear now than after you have accepted an offer.

The broader version of that trade is whether living in St. George is actually cheaper than the Wasatch Front, and the answer is less clear-cut than people assume.

Run my numbers — it takes about two minutes to send, and I build the report by hand.