By Libertina Brandt | Video and photography by Steve Craft for WSJ
During Arizona's scorching summers, many Phoenix-area residents make the hourslong trek to popular mountain resort towns like Flagstaff and Pinetop-Lakeside. Matt and Kelly Dee wanted something closer to home.
In 2024, they paid $835,000 for a cabin in the rural community of Pine in Arizona's Rim Country, about an hour and a half drive from their primary home in the city of Mesa, just outside Phoenix. Now, when temperatures in Mesa exceed 100 degrees, they can quickly escape to Pine, which sits at an elevation of about 5,400 feet with typical summer temperatures in the high 80s or low 90s during the day and cooler nights.
"I can get there door-to-door in 90 minutes, which is ideal for us," said Matt, 48, chief information officer at a healthcare nonprofit, who first discovered Pine on a hunting trip. By contrast, it takes over two hours to reach Flagstaff or Pinetop-Lakeside.
Long a well-kept secret, Rim Country is increasingly popular with second-home buyers and retirees. As the Phoenix metro increases in population -- from around 2.2 million people in 1990 to an estimated 7.5 million by 2055 -- Rim Country is seeing spillover from the state's more established second-home mountain markets, such as Prescott, Flagstaff and Pinetop-Lakeside. Buyers are drawn to Rim Country for its proximity to the Phoenix area and comparatively lower home prices, according to local real-estate agent Jeanie Teyechea of Pine Real Estate.
In August, the median home price in Rim Country was about $425,000, nearly double the 2018 median of $240,000, but well below Flagstaff's median of $644,500, according to local real-estate agent and attorney Dennis Riccio.
Residents say rural Rim Country has a slow-paced, cowboy-esque lifestyle. Retired pharmaceutical executive Matt Portch, who moved to the Rim Country town of Payson from Boston in 2021, said it isn't uncommon to see people carrying handguns. "If you pull up at an intersection and there's not four other pickups around you, then you're starting to wonder what's going on," added his wife, Linda Portch.
Rim Country isn't without environmental challenges, including the risk of future water shortages in some areas and the growing risk of more frequent and severe wildfires.
The name Rim Country -- which includes Payson and the rural communities of Pine and Strawberry -- comes from the region's location along the Mogollon Rim, the southern edge of the Colorado Plateau. Known for rodeos, elk and ponderosa pine forests, the once-remote region became more accessible in the late 1950s, with the paving of the Beeline Highway.
Linda Hamlet and her partner, Bob Miller, spend their winters at the Desert Mountain Club in Scottsdale and their summers at Payson's Rim Golf Club, where they bought a home in 2021 for $1.5 million. They considered buying in Prescott, about 100 miles northwest of Payson, but preferred the scenic Beeline Highway to the busier route to Prescott.
Bob, who sold equipment to electric utilities, and Linda, who has served on several nonprofit boards, are now retired and spending their time on the golf course. Their four-bedroom, 4,300-square-foot house in Payson overlooks the Rim Golf Course, with a pond separating their property from a putting green. About half of the 555-acre community remains in its natural state, with tall ponderosa pines and bald eagles, ospreys and great blue herons. "The ambience of the forest is very much in line with our love for being out in the wilderness," said Hamlet.
About three years ago, Linda's twin sister, Margot Gasch, moved from Virginia to be closer to her. Gasch settled in the Golf Club at Chaparral Pines gated community, which is across the street from the Rim Golf Club.
In Pine, Matt Dee's family has also joined him. His sister-in-law, interior designer Kim Dee, first became acquainted with the community in early 2024 while working on a client's home. After Matt purchased his cabin, she was inspired to follow suit. Earlier this year, Kim bought land in Pine with her husband, Chris Dee, and four other family members. The group paid $235,000 for a 1-acre lot, where they plan to build a three-bedroom home. The project is expected to cost a total of about $1.25 million.
One big reason they chose the lot was that it already came with a water meter, said Kim. Pine, along with its neighboring community Strawberry, has long faced the threat of a future water shortage due to shallow wells, aging infrastructure and the decadeslong drought affecting much of the western U.S., according to the Pine-Strawberry Water Improvement District. When seasonal residents arrive in the summer, water usage can surge to three times that of the winter months. To help curb water usage, a moratorium on new water meters in Pine and Strawberry was put in place in 2022, stopping most new home projects from moving forward and creating a wait list of about 150 requests for meters, according to PSWID chairman Cory Ellsworth. In 2024, the moratorium was revised, allowing five new water meter permits to be issued each month. The PSWID is working through the wait list, Ellsworth said.
Pine and Strawberry have enough available water to last at least 20 more years, said Ellsworth. To increase that supply, PSWID has replaced about a quarter of the water system's infrastructure over the past four years. A new, roughly 2,000-foot-deep well is expected to increase the water supply by about 25%.
For Matt and Kelly, a bigger issue was securing wildfire insurance. Arizona has seen a number of major wildfires in recent years, and in 2022, an update to the Northern Gila County Community Wildfire Protection Plan flagged more areas in Rim Country as high-risk than previous versions.
The typical annual premium for a $500,000 home in Pine or Strawberry four years ago was between $500 and $800, according to local insurance broker Karen Kolb. Now, the yearly premium for that same house would typically be $1,200 to $4,200.
Matt and Kelly have had the same insurance on their Mesa house for 25 years, but couldn't get the same company to cover their Pine home because of the wildfire risk. "I went through every major homeowners insurance company you can think of," said Matt. "They all shut us down. We ended up having to get a broker and going into the secondary market."
In 2022, when the Portches' home insurance in Payson was up for renewal, they decided to shop around. "A lot of companies that I called, as soon as I gave them the ZIP Code, they said, 'Oh, we don't insure that area anymore,'" said Matt Portch. They decided to keep their existing insurance.
For some buyers, the difficulty of securing wildfire insurance in Rim Country is an obstacle to purchasing property.
Last year, Riccio's clients Tracey and Billy Hassett were living primarily in Flagstaff when they started looking to buy a home in Payson. Drawn to the area's slow pace and small-town feel, they decided they want to live there for the rest of their lives. "We just decided, OK: toe-tag places," Tracey said. "Where are the places that we die? And Payson was absolutely, positively number one on the list."
They went into contract to buy a home in Chaparral Pines, but none of the insurance providers approved by their mortgage lender would cover the property as a second home because of wildfire risk. They backed out of the deal. "We were gutted," said Tracey, 53, a psychotherapist. Determined to buy in the area, they decided to purchase their next home in cash. In July, they paid $1.245 million for a three-bedroom Mountain Modern house in the Rim Golf Club. They plan to make it their full-time residence once they sell their Flagstaff home, which is listed for $1.56 million.
Mike Marksberry, 70, a retired civil-construction estimator, moved from Mesa to a roughly $600,000 home on the Pine-Strawberry border last October. Since then, the motorcycle enthusiast has had to switch insurers twice because of wildfire concerns. He's secured a third policy for $3,000 a year, about $1,000 more than he was originally paying.
So far, the area's beauty and climate make it worth the hassle, he said. "We have snow."
Write to Libertina Brandt at Libertina.Brandt@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
November 05, 2025 20:00 ET (01:00 GMT)
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