Like I said, you have no concept. I spent the last 20+ years of my career in banking in WV. Covered the whole state, so had clients from Wheeling to Martinsburg, to Beckley and back to Huntington.
Guess what I got from every customer? Yep, tax returns, financial statements, brokerage statements, operating statements, trust documents, and everything else necessary to understand the financial position of the people I was lending millions of dollars.
You have no concept of how many 8 and 9 figure nets worth people are in WV. You have no idea how many people are capable of throwing $10MM on the table with 24 hour notice by simply liquidating a portion of their portfolio or even just pulling existing cash.
I think what you’re not grasping is a few facts.
First, real estate in WV historically has not been developed by large, out of state, developers. That has left the door open for the locals to control the markets. When WVU was growing rapidly 15-20 years ago there were 4 groups of locals that were building almost all the new units. There’s a developer out of Charleston that has made close to 9 figures in just the last 10-12 years building exclusively throughout WV. I can name at least 100 individuals that have an 8 figure net worth and annual high 7 figure cash flow. And remember, I was one bank and didn’t bank everybody.
Second, you miss the fact that there are many, many family owned, long established, businesses in WV. Some have been acquired in the past decades by outside interest, but these companies have been pumping out cash flow for years with the money not going to paid executives and small shareholders, but aggregated within families.
Lastly, there are a lot of people that have accumulated generational wealth simply from their land. Their families have collected coal and gas lease money for decades, or even a century in some cases.
There’s a reason that at one time Bramwell WV was the richest per capita town in America with a higher concentration of millionaires than NYC. The value of natural resources.
