St. George Utah Real Estate Blog

Ask a lender what your closing costs will be in St. George and you will usually get a worksheet full of estimates. Ask the internet and you will get a national percentage that was wrong the day it was published. So let me give you a more useful answer. Some of your closing costs are decided by the Utah purchase contract itself, some are set by statute, and the rest live on the Loan Estimate your lender must hand you within three business days of your application. In this post I will walk through each piece, tell you exactly which numbers I can verify as of August 2026, and be honest about which ones nobody can quote until you have a live loan file. After thirteen years and 275+ closings in Washington County, I can also tell you where buyers get surprised, and it is almost never where they expect.

Buyers ask me to explain the difference between Washington City and St. George almost every week, usually after a weekend of driving around and realizing they never saw a sign telling them they had crossed from one into the other. The two share a school district, a hospital, a freeway and a border you cannot see from the car, and their property tax rates are so close that on a $500,000 home the difference is under two dollars a year. The tax answer everyone expects to matter does not. What separates them are the utility bills, the pace of growth, which side of the Virgin River your power comes from, and how far you sit from the hospital.

Sellers ask me what their house will sell for long before they ask what it will cost them to sell it, and I understand why: the sale price is the fun number. The gap between the contract price and the money that actually reaches your account is real, though, and on a median-priced Washington County home it runs well into five figures. Most of it is knowable months in advance. Utah keeps the transaction cleaner than a lot of states do, there is no tax on the transfer itself, and the line items that do exist are either published, negotiable, or predictable enough to plan around. What follows is the honest accounting, with the source and the date behind every number I quote.

People moving here with kids ask me one question more than any other: where do families actually buy in St. George? After 13 years and 275 closed sales in Washington County, I can tell you the honest answer is that there is no single best neighborhood, but there are five or six areas where family buyers keep landing for reasons that hold up: school zones, parks you can walk to, newer housing stock, and prices that still work on a normal income. In this guide I will walk through Little Valley, Washington Fields, Desert Color, Bloomington, Coral Canyon, and Green Springs the way I would if you were sitting in my truck, with July 2026 sold prices and the trade-offs nobody puts in the brochure.

I pulled the July numbers for Washington County this weekend, and they tell two stories at once. The median sale price hit $544,990, up 4.2% from last July. Closed sales fell 15.8% over the same stretch, to 309 homes. Prices up, activity down, and both of those things are true at the same time. If you only read headlines, you would think the market is either booming or stalling depending on which number the writer picked. The honest answer is that it split, and knowing which side of the split your home or your budget sits on matters more right now than any single statistic.

One of the first questions I get from buyers moving here, usually right after "how hot does it really get," is what property taxes look like in St. George. The short answer surprises most people: the median property tax bill in St. George is $1,813 a year on a median home value of $476,600, which works out to an effective rate of 0.37 percent. The national median is 1.02 percent. If you are coming from California, Texas, Illinois, or the Northeast, your tax bill here will probably come in lower than you dared to hope. But there is a catch built into Utah law that trips up second-home buyers every single year, and in a market where a big share of my clients are buying a winter place or a lock-and-leave, that catch deserves a full explanation.

Since writing this I built an interactive Southern Utah property tax calculator so you can stop reading estimates and see your own number. Enter any price and it runs the 2026 proposed rates for all 13 Washington County tax areas, then runs that same home through 11 other cities people move here from, including Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, Mesquite, Boise, Seattle, Sacramento, Los Angeles, Austin, Miami, Boston and New York. There is a toggle for primary residence, long-term rental and second home, which is the distinction this whole article is about.

The question behind half the phone calls I get is some version of this one: how much do we actually need to make to buy a home in St. George? So let me answer it with real numbers instead of a shrug. Based on June 2026 sales data from our local MLS, the median home in St. George sold for $492,500. At the current 30-year mortgage rate of 6.58%, a buyer putting 20% down needs a household income of roughly $119,000 a year to carry that home comfortably under the standard lending guideline. Put down 3.5% on an FHA loan instead and the number jumps to about $153,000, because you are borrowing more and paying mortgage insurance on top of it. Those are the headline figures. The rest of this post walks through the math line by line, what changes the number in your favor, and the programs that help if the target feels out of reach.