This is how COVID-19 changed moving patterns in the US.

More than one in 10 Americans moved in 2020. Many of them are wealthy, they’re buying houses fast and paying a lot for them. It’s all contributing to the hottest markets since the housing crisis in 2006. No matter what kind of house you’re looking for, the price of a mid-range house went up by more than 20% in 2020. When you look at the federal reserve bank data you can figure out which places saw the most people come, the most people leave, and which of these changes might be permanent. High-cost coastal cities have been losing more people to suburbs and smaller cities since about 2016. The pandemic turbocharged that trend. The biggest losers have been New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Washington DC. Major cities that had to shut down bars, restaurants and stores. Urban neighborhoods lost an average of 276.000 people every month from March to September. According to one estimate, most of the time it’s people leaving the core of the city for a suburb or a neighboring town. People going from New York to the Hudson Valley or going from San Francisco to Vallejo for example. Other people are moving to a new metro area, so think about San Franciscans moving to Sacramento or New Yorkers moving to Philadelphia. New York City lost a net 200.000 people mostly from higher income neighborhoods, and if that New Yorker didn’t move upstate, they may have gone to florida, which is now home to 64.000 more big apple transplants. 

On the other side of the country, California’s population dropped for the first time since its founding in 1850 by 182.000 people. Nearly 110.000 people left Los Angeles heading mostly to San Diego. If they went out of state, they likely left for Dallas, Las Vegas or Phoenix, but the pandemic wasn’t the only thing driving movement in 2020. Immigration rates dropped across the country, mostly affecting major cities like New York and LA. The market’s light speed it’s insane, but it seems to be in a healthy way. Millennials are a big driver of this movement as they get older, and prepare to settle down right now. There’s five million more people aged 25 to 34 than there were 10 years ago. That is the kind of key tipping point age range, when Americans go from being majority renters to majority homeowners. First-time buyers bought nearly one-third of all homes sold in 2020. If you moved there’s a good chance you’re a millennial, but you also might just be rich. Places like The Hamptons, West Palm Beach, Aspen, or Lake Tahoe (just to name a few of these really highly desired vacation destinations), did see a huge increase in movements relative to a normal year. There’s a lot about the way this pandemic driven recession hit. Surprising periods of recession tend to actually reduce mobility and reduce moves and vacation properties. Also housing inventory is near an all-time low, in part because the price of lumber hit an all-time high. But in the less surprising category, it had a disproportionate impact on low-income workers, and not on the higher income professional employees. Indeed more than half of all pandemic job losses came from industries with low average wages. People who have been able to keep their jobs, who have stock portfolios, they’ve seen their wealth increase and those are the people who are really driving the housing market right now.

In Phoenix, the city was considered the epicenter of the housing crisis. homes in the downtown area lost more than half of their value, and Arizona’s foreclosure rate was second in the nation. Phoenix is now the fastest appreciating major housing market and experts say it doesn’t look like a bubble this time. Arizona keeps popping up as one of the most frequent destinations for movers in America. These movers often come from more expensive markets, they bring higher budgets with them which can price out local buyers in places like Phoenix, Austin or Las Vegas. They’re buying a site unseen and they’re putting tons of money as an earnest deposit. 63% of people who bought a home, placed an offer without seeing the property in person. Cities like Chattanooga, Tennessee, Allentown, Pennsylvania and Winston-Salem, North Carolina have home values rising more than 13% per year, but they’re still somewhat affordable. The housing market shows no signs of slowing according to all the experts and they warn the long-term impact of pandemic movement will depend largely on how long people can work from home. Some movers are already showing buyers remorse; nearly two-thirds of millennials say they regret buying their current homes. They are asking themselves if they should head back to the city.