Reno home prices mirror Sacramento home prices now.
That may be true, and makes sense. They are close enough - about 2 hours drive.
But Reno has plenty of room for growth. New housing construction (supply) will rectify the price problem caused by increased demand - perhaps to the chagrin of some of the people benefiting from increased equity. Sacto is much denser by comparison, spread all the way out to places like Folsom 25 miles away.
One major difference is availability of jobs. More businesses are moving to Reno but Sacto area feeds a lot of government jobs. Reno will likely (hopefully) never get to that kind of scale where 1 in 8 “employees” are paid by taxpayers. We even considered moving a small factory to Reno a couple years ago, and still may end up doing so in the future. CA is problematic for all businesses, but especially for manufacturing.