Will Parker

After the story came out, there's a

consulting firm called John Burns that has been surveying land brokers about this.

And they found that a third of land brokers nationally saw some form of residential land flip over to data centers in just the last year.

And in areas like the Northeast, which includes Virginia in this case, it's much more common than that.

So cases of buyouts at that scale, I don't know that there are many.

There's certainly many cases of homeowners who have a decent piece of land along with it selling to data centers and pockets.

And I've certainly heard, just since I wrote the story, from people in real estate business say, I'm aware of a subdivision of 200 homes that's in talks to potentially sell to

data center developer because they're kind of walled in by other data centers.

And if such a company is willing to pay a lot of money for their houses, they're willing to consider it.

So that level of buying up a subdivision that's already been built, there's not a lot of, but you could see that there might be more of it just considering the value of land in some of these areas where data centers are building and where there's the power infrastructure that makes them attractive to build there.

No, it's really high.

I mean, if you look at existing data centers, they're like 99% occupied.

So the signal that sends to the market is that we should build more of them because we can fill them with Google or Microsoft or other tech tenants.

How long that continues to happen is unclear.

And of course, there's a lot of political pushback to their development now and a lot of laws that are changing, but the demand is still there.

I think it depends on the scale.

I think an area that has a couple of data centers that are a couple of miles away, most people don't care that much.

Some people certainly do.

It's when an area becomes like a magnet for data centers and there's several of them, dozens of them, and they're encroaching really closely on their subdivision or where they live that you see people more upset about it.

It's very different than suburban sprawl where you have retail.