St. George Utah Real Estate Blog

Utah law already lets you build a second living unit inside your own house, and most homeowners I talk to here have no idea it is on the books. Under Utah Code 10-21-303, effective November 6, 2025, an internal accessory dwelling unit is a permitted use in any area zoned primarily for residential use, and a city may not restrict its size relative to the house, the lot size, the street frontage, or how the two spaces connect. Detached units are where the local rules bite, and St. George rewrote its version three weeks ago. Here is what the code says in each city as of September 10, 2026, with the sections so you can read it yourself.

Through the end of August, 2,922 homes have closed in Washington County this year against 2,926 over the same stretch of 2025. That is a difference of four sales out of nearly three thousand. Every month in between has looked dramatic, and August looked worse than most: the median sale price fell 2.7 percent, closings dropped almost 18 percent, and the typical home took four days longer to sell. Line the two years up and they are close to a tie. Here is what August actually did, and the single price band that explains most of it.

If you are upside down on your Southern Utah home and weighing a short sale, one thing changed this year that most local pages have not caught up to. The federal exclusion that let homeowners keep forgiven mortgage debt out of taxable income expired for discharges after December 31, 2025. Congress has not renewed it. So the balance your lender writes off in a 2026 short sale is generally taxable income now, federally and in Utah, unless your discharge falls under an arrangement entered into and evidenced in writing before January 1, 2026, or another exclusion applies to you.

There is no Washington County short-term rental rule. Every city writes its own, unincorporated county land runs on a separate ordinance, and they disagree on which zones qualify, how many days count as short term, and whether a new license is available at all. I have had buyers go under contract on a nightly rental because someone told them the area allowed it, then learn the city had stopped issuing licenses in that zone two years earlier. The rule that governs a house belongs to the jurisdiction whose line it sits inside.

A $600,000 primary residence in Washington County, Utah is billed somewhere between about $1,928 and $2,629 a year in property tax at 2026 proposed rates, and where it lands inside that range depends on which city you buy in. That is the entire spread across the county, roughly $700 a year, and it is far narrower than most people moving here expect. Between two similarly priced homes here, the biggest differences usually come down to how the property is used and whether the parcel sits inside a special taxing district, and both of those swing the number by thousands rather than hundreds.

If you are buying a home in the St. George area and schools matter to your family, the first thing to know is that every address in Washington County, Utah is assigned to four public schools, not one: an elementary school for kindergarten through 5th grade, an intermediate school for 6th and 7th, a middle school for 8th and 9th, and a high school for 10th through 12th. The second thing to know is that those assignments can change after you buy, and they have changed twice in the last two years in the fastest growing parts of town. This post covers how Washington County School District assigns schools, how boundaries actually get redrawn, and how open enrollment works when the school you want is not the one your address gets.

I spent most of a day last week doing something tedious: reading Utah closing cost pages side by side with the actual documents they claim to describe. The state-approved purchase contract, First American Title's Utah rate schedule, and the Washington County Recorder's published fee schedule. Three claims turn up over and over that the source documents do not support, and one of them is now being repeated back to people by AI search answers that quote the correct contract language and then draw the opposite conclusion from it. If you are buying or selling in Washington County, these three errors are probably sitting in your budget right now, and two of the three are making you plan for more money than you need.

If you want to walk out your front door and be on a dirt trail in St. George, Utah, the addresses that deliver that are a short list: Paradise Canyon on the northwest side, the streets feeding the Gap Trailhead on Cascade Canyon Drive, Bloomington off Navajo Drive, Green Valley off Canyon View Drive, and the north Main Street blocks around Brooks Nature Park. Each sits at a published trailhead into the Red Cliffs Desert Reserve or the Bearclaw Poppy system, and getting on the trail from them costs nothing. Snow Canyon State Park is a different arrangement, because it charges an entrance fee even when you arrive on foot.

Two identical houses in Washington County, Utah, using the same 2,000 kilowatt hours in the same August, can get power bills $88 apart. That is not a difference in insulation or thermostat settings. It is a difference in which utility happens to serve the address, and buyers almost never look at it before they write an offer. Six different electric providers operate inside this county, their rate structures do not resemble each other, and the cheapest one at low usage is not the cheapest one at high usage. If you are moving here from California, the gap that matters to you is bigger still: the same consumption that costs $217 on St. George City power runs $801 on PG&E's tiered residential schedule.

Almost every buyer who calls me about a trailer, a boat or a fifth wheel asks the same question in the same nervous way: can I keep it at the house? The answer depends on which city you land in, and the three cities most of my clients choose between handle it very differently. St. George regulates the surface you park on. Washington City regulates the front yard. Hurricane bans it from the street entirely, at any hour with no grace period, then turns around and says plainly that storing it on your own property is fine. Three different philosophies inside a twenty minute drive, and buying into the wrong one with a 38 foot toy hauler is an expensive thing to discover after closing.