St. George Utah Real Estate Blog

No HOA in St. George, Utah means no monthly dues, no architectural committee and no letters about your trash cans, but it does not mean no rules. The St. George City Code still decides how tall your front fence can be, how long a trailer can sit on the street, what happens to a broken-down truck in the driveway, whether you can run a home business and whether you can rent the house by the night. Recorded covenants from an old plat can also bind a lot that has no association at all. Here is what still applies, with the code section for each rule, and the three checks I run before I tell a buyer a house really has no HOA.

A VA loan is worth more in St. George, Utah than most veterans realize, and the biggest piece of it often has nothing to do with the mortgage. On a $600,000 home with nothing down, the VA funding fee is $12,900 on first use under the fee table VA lists as current in October 2026, and a veteran who receives VA disability compensation pays none of it. If that veteran is rated 100 percent disabled, Washington County's exemption of up to $535,459 of taxable value also covers the roughly $2,177 a year in property tax that the same home carries in St. George at 2026 proposed rates. VA buyers are still rare here, which matters when you write an offer: 125 of the 3,311 Washington County residential closings recorded in the MLS from January through September 2026 used VA financing, about one in 26.

Washington County, Utah had 1,992 active residential listings in September 2026, up 6.4 percent from 1,872 in September 2025 and up 59 percent from 1,253 in September 2019, the last September before COVID. Those counts come from the Washington County MLS, which I pulled month by month on October 16, 2026, going back to January 2018. Inventory bottomed at 332 homes in April 2021, so a buyer today has six times as many homes to look at as a buyer did in the tightest month of the pandemic.

St. George, Utah has two electric companies, and the Virgin River mostly decides which one you get. The City of St. George serves the north side, and Dixie Power serves the parts of the city south of the river, which the city itself names as Bloomington, Bloomington Hills and Little Valley. At the published residential rates before tax, a house using 2,000 kWh in a summer month pays $216.61 on St. George City power and $181.04 on Dixie Power, a $35.57 gap. Below about 856 kWh in summer the city is the cheaper of the two by a couple of dollars, and from October through May Dixie wins at almost any usage above about 298 kWh. The other news is brand new: St. George started a monthly power cost adjustment on bills in October 2026, and the first one is a credit.

Washington County is small on a map, and the mileage backs that up. Utah Department of Transportation mileposts put the St. George Boulevard interchange at I-15 milepost 8.666 and the Hurricane exit at milepost 15.948, which is 7.28 miles of freeway between them. The reason commutes here still catch people out is that nearly all of the traffic squeezes through a handful of segments, and the busiest of those carries 72,000 vehicles on an average day. I pulled UDOT's 2024 traffic counts for I-15, SR-9, Bluff Street and St. George Boulevard so you can see where the volume actually sits before you decide which side of the county to live on.

The median sale price in Washington County, Utah was $499,990 in September 2026, down 0.2 percent from $500,995 a year earlier, and 319 homes closed in September 2026 against 322 in September 2025. Those are the settled counts from the MLS as of October 4, 2026. The report I pulled on the night of September 30 counted only 298 sales, which is why a count read on the first of the month makes the market look weaker than it was. The bigger news for anyone buying is outside the county: the Federal Reserve raised its target rate on September 16, and Freddie Mac's 30-year average reached 7.28 percent on October 1.

Little Valley is the part of St. George where people still keep horses inside the city limits, and it is also where buyers get surprised most often after they close. The surprises come from three things a listing photo cannot show: what the zoning on that lot allows, whether the subdivision carries a homeowners association, and how close the lot sits to the St. George Regional Airport. Here is what I check before writing an offer there, with the code sections so you can read them yourself.

For years the honest answer to "what will insurance run me" was that Utah is one of the cheapest states in the country and you should not lose sleep over it. The first half is still true. The second half has gotten complicated. In 2025 the Utah Insurance Department ran something close to a controlled experiment: it took one hypothetical $450,000 house in Hurricane, here in Washington County, and had the state's twenty largest home insurers price it. Fifteen quoted. The cheapest was $671 a year and the most expensive was $4,392.75, same house, same coverage, same day.

Buyers ask me about water in Washington County more often than they ask about schools, and it is a fair question in a desert that keeps adding people. The answer starts with a fact that surprises almost everyone who moves here: every drop of culinary water in this county comes out of one watershed. There is no second river and no imported supply. The Washington County Water Conservancy District puts countywide delivery at roughly 50,000 acre feet of potable water a year, all of it from the Virgin River and the ground underneath it. What that means for you has less to do with taps running dry than with what it costs to connect a new house, and what a city can require from a builder before it will sign a plat.