Three Times the Calls, and Almost All of Them Mention Taxes

Something changed this year, and I can measure it from my own phone.

We're fielding about three times the volume of calls for big custom homes that we were a year ago. Many more of them are from out of state, and California is the lion's share. Almost every one of those conversations gets around to taxes. About half are urgent.

I'm a builder, not an economist, so take this for what it is: what one contractor is seeing from the inside of a busy year. But the pattern is consistent enough that I think it's worth writing down, especially if you own a lot in Reno or at the lake and are trying to decide when to build.

What I assumed was happening, and what's actually happening

My first assumption was the obvious one: AI money. Silicon Valley is having a moment, and Tahoe is the closest mountain water to it.

That turns out to be mostly wrong, and it's worth being precise about why, because the "AI millionaires are buying Tahoe" story is going to be everywhere in the next year and a lot of it will be nonsense.

The big AI IPOs haven't happened yet. OpenAI is aiming at the end of this year. Anthropic filed confidentially in July. Databricks is still private. Even when a company goes public, employees typically can't sell for six months. Whatever wealth those listings create mostly can't buy anything until 2027.

And the one big design-and-software IPO that did complete is a cautionary tale. Figma went public in July 2025 and the stock popped hard. By the time the lockup expired in January, it was trading below its IPO price — down about 80% from the high. A lot of people watched a paper fortune evaporate before they were allowed to touch it.

So the buyers showing up here right now aren't newly minted. They were already wealthy. What changed isn't their net worth. It's the cost of keeping a California address.

The thing nobody was talking about a year ago

There's a wealth tax initiative headed for California's November ballot. As written, it would impose a one-time levy on net worth above a billion dollars, and — this is the part that got everyone's attention — it would apply retroactively to people who were California residents at the start of this year. It was drafted specifically to make leaving not work.

I'm not going to pretend to explain tax law to you. I build houses. If any of this touches you, that's a conversation for your CPA and your attorney, not your contractor.

What I can tell you is the effect I'm watching in real time: people are moving, they're moving now, and when they explain why, they use the word taxes.

And there's exactly one place on this lake where the move actually works. Incline Village and Crystal Bay are the only Tahoe communities where you can own on the water and be a Nevada resident. No state income tax, no capital gains tax, no estate tax, against California's 13-plus percent at the top. Every other beautiful spot on this lake is in California.

That's why the money is landing on one specific shore instead of spreading out.

The receipts

This isn't a rumor. The sales are public and they're extraordinary.

Sergey Brin bought a five-acre estate in Crystal Bay for around $42 million. In March, Steve Jurvetson paid $125 million for a compound — a record for the region — and picked up roughly $53 million in neighboring parcels on top of it. Over on the California side, a lot at Martis Camp traded at $23.6 million, a record for that community and for Truckee.

The one buyer in the group who genuinely made his money in AI is Naveen Rao, who founded an AI company and bought a $20 million house in Incline Village in April. He closed in about ten days.

That detail is the tell. Ten days isn't shopping. That's someone establishing residency.

One caution if you're reading market reports this year: you'll see a statistic going around that Incline Village sales volume jumped more than 600% in the first quarter. It's technically true and deeply misleading — roughly 88% of that increase is Jurvetson's single purchase. One transaction is not a market.

What's actually happening to the rest of the market

Here's the part the excited headlines leave out: the Tahoe market overall is not booming. It's splitting in two.

The average sale price in the Tahoe-Truckee area hit a record this spring while the median fell. That's not appreciation, that's a handful of enormous sales dragging the average up. Median prices actually declined in most Tahoe submarkets this year. The only places they rose were Incline, Crystal Bay, and lakefront.

The middle of the market — call it $1.5 to $3 million — has gotten slower. Homes that moved in three or four weeks at the peak are sitting 60 to 90 days. Inventory is building.

And it's not just here. Aspen's dollar volume fell by half in the first half of this year. Jackson Hole's median listing price slipped while its $10-million-plus tier jumped. The same split is happening in every mountain town: the very top is on fire and everything below it is ordinary.

So if you own a lot up here, be careful which story you tell yourself. The billionaires are having a different year than the rest of us.

The part that affects your build, whether or not you care about any of this

Here's where it stops being real estate gossip and starts costing you months.

Our preferred subcontractors are running three to nine months out. There are exceptions, and we work around it, but that's the honest range right now. A year ago that conversation was different.

And the AI boom is reaching this region — just not the way anyone expects. It's not sending me clients. It's competing with me for electricians.

Drive out I-80 east of Sparks and you'll see why. The Tahoe Reno Industrial Center has become one of the top five data center markets in the country. A $4.6 billion campus broke ground there in May. A roughly $3 billion one has three of its four buildings still to come. Another is under construction through 2028, and Microsoft is sitting on more than 225 acres it hasn't built on yet. The campus that broke ground this spring will need about 1,500 construction workers at its peak — and about 100 people to run it once it's finished. That ratio is the whole story: these projects eat skilled trades for years and give almost none of them back.

Here's the number that stopped me. At the end of September, IBEW Local 401 — the Reno electricians' union — listed thirteen local journeymen available for work. Thirteen, for Northern Nevada. The bench is essentially empty.

And it can't refill quickly. A Nevada electrician needs 8,000 hours on the job plus classroom time to make journeyman, which takes four to five years. Somebody who started an apprenticeship last year won't be a journeyman until 2028 or later. There's no fast fix coming.

In fairness, not every corner of Northern Nevada construction is tight. A lot of private development slowed this year on high rates and costs, and some contractors are bidding hard for less work. The squeeze isn't everywhere. It's in the skilled trades, and it's at the top of the market — which is exactly where a custom home on the Nevada shore lives. And it doesn't stop at the state line. Truckee has its own trades, but a lot of the crews working up there drive up from Reno every morning, so when Reno gets tight, Truckee feels it too.

Nationally the picture is the same. The contractor workforce survey published in early September found 88% of firms with open craft positions say they're as hard or harder to fill than a year ago, electricians hardest of all at 81% — and it named data center construction as a strain on the labor supply.

That's on top of materials. Copper wire and conduit are up 20 to 35% this year. Aluminum is up about a third. HVAC equipment jumped 10 to 18% when the new refrigerant rules took effect in January. Baseline construction escalation is running 4 to 6%, and the trades that touch copper are running well past that.

So the squeeze on your build isn't coming from rich people outbidding you for a lot. It's coming from the trades being booked and the materials costing more every quarter — and on the Nevada side, the data center pipeline says that stays true for years, not months.

What I'd do if I owned a lot here

Three things are true at the same time right now:

The land can't expand. At the lake, the basin is ringed by federal land, and TRPA coverage rules decide whether a given parcel can be built on at all. Down in Reno it's a different fence with the same result: the valley is boxed in by public land and the California line, and the region's own builders association says land is the constraint. Nobody is opening a new subdivision on the lake when demand goes up. What exists is what exists.

The trades are booked. Three to nine months for the good ones. That's before design, before review, before a permit. And the electrician bench isn't refilling until the end of the decade, so get your key subs under contract early rather than hoping one opens up.

Half the people calling me are in a hurry. Whatever is driving them — and they tell me it's taxes — they're not waiting for a better moment.

Put those together and the math is unforgiving. If you're picturing yourself in a finished house two years from now, the work starts this winter. Not next spring. Design takes months at this level, review takes months after that, and then you're standing in line for a framer.

I'm not telling you to panic, and I'm definitely not telling you what to do with your taxes. I'm telling you what my calendar looks like, because that's the piece of this you can't read about anywhere else.

If you own a lot in Incline Village, Crystal Bay, Clear Creek, Carson Valley, or anywhere around Reno — ArrowCreek, Montreux, St. James's Village — and you want a straight answer about what your build actually looks like on a calendar, including whether waiting a year costs you anything, reach out. We'll walk it with you. And we never stopped working in California. We started in the Bay Area, so we know exactly where a lot of these calls are coming from.