Researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco said Monday the work-from-home shift brought on by the pandemic may account for more than half of overall home price increases in the United States. That goes for rents too.

According to surveys, 30% of work was still being done at home as of last month. And for a lot of people, that’s not expected to change.

At the start of the pandemic, Kim Cadena lived in a 700-square-foot rental in Alexandria, Virginia, where they work as a housing analyst for the city.

“It was one of those open floor plan apartments. So basically, one room that was the living room, dining room and a little galley kitchen where you could, like, see into the whole place, and then a separate bedroom.”

When Cadena started working from home in 2020, that bedroom started to feel like their only escape from work.

So this August, Cadena moved to a bigger place.

“It has a separate den. So I can, you know, separate the workspace from, you know, the rest of my life.”

But they now pay $2,000 a month — $335 more than before.

Demand for newer, bigger housing options has grown during the pandemic. Researchers at the San Francisco Fed and the University of California, San Diego, said the move to remote work was an important factor in the 24% rise in home prices between November 2019 and November 2021.

“Our work suggests that housing demand is going to remain elevated relative to where it was before the pandemic,” said Johannes Wieland of UCSD, who worked on the Fed’s research.

There’s now plenty of evidence that housing and other causes of inflation are not as transitory as Fed policymakers once thought they were, said Meg Jacobs, a senior research scholar at Princeton University.

“Those situations have taken longer to resolve. The Fed feels that it has to act,” she said.

But Jacobs said it’s not clear that hiking interest rates will affect what she calls structural changes in this new economy. Chief among them: housing and the transition so many have made to working from home.