Winning and Losing Metros Amid the Ongoing Migration Race

You can almost hear the opening bells of the race. Not the recently completed Kentucky Derby where 30-1 longshot Rich Strike who took the Run for the Roses, and the $1.86 million purse. 

No, this is the Dash for the Doors and Dollars. How great shifts in US demographic patterns, as people head from where they were to where they hope life will be better, are changing the face of the multifamily industry and its markets.

Apartment List released its renter migration report for the first quarter of 2022, which shows where people are looking to leave and the places they want to live. The data does require a bit of salt, as it has two potential shortcomings. One is that it’s based on searches, not on actual moves. That would seem to be a decent proxy for migration, but people also might search considering potential moves, to see what an area was like for a friend or relative, or otherwise looking for information without a transition following.

The other issue is that the data is the company’s own, based on registered users who searched in that first quarter. The data, then, is self-selecting and wouldn’t necessarily represent all people who searched for apartments, let alone moved.

However, business is almost always a victim of data limitations. Given these, the patterns are interesting to note. There are two broad categories of information the analysis has. One is outbound searches, which means someone in a metro area looking to move someplace, which could be within that metro or in another. Inbound searches, on the other hand, are all those looking for apartments in a metro area, whether from the same metro or another. The useful part is that Apartment List calculated outbound searches looking in a different metro and inbound searches from another metro.

The site has a visualization display that can dig up interesting aspects. For example, of the people in New York looking for an apartment, 62.8% are looking within the area while 37.2% are looking outside. Those looking to move to New York split into 74% from within the metro and 26% outside. Compare that to Miami, where of those looking to move, 72% want to stay in the area and 28% are looking outside. Of those looking to move there, 64.5% are within the metro, 35.5% from outside.

Then there’s the table of technology centers, where, taking Charlotte as an example, 54.6% of those in the area looking to move are searching for different metros.

Apartment listed noted that “five metros are behaving like revolving doors and show up in both lists: San Jose CA, Raleigh NC, Denver CO, Austin TX, and Nashville TN.” While there are tech-driven economies, housing is expensive.

There’s also accumulated state-level data with such tidbits as 16.2% of people in California looking for apartments are eyeing Arizona.