COVID-19 Drives Suburban Migration

According to a recent Redfin report, July found a surge of home buyers looking to leave expensive cities for more rural, inland locales. The current COVID-10 pandemic has taken its toll in many ways, among which includes how it has affected the housing migration.

A growing trend finds home buyers fleeing the expensive coastal cities like San Francisco and New York in search of more affordable areas. According to Redfin, over one quarter (27.8%) of redfin.com users reported wanting to relocate to another metro area during the month of July.

Experts are pointing directly to the increased number of people now working remotely (most from their own homes) as being a huge catalyst for this desire to move away from cities with sky-high costs of living and cramped density, thus downsizing their expenses and (hopefully) increasing their space and house size due to greater affordability in greener pastures.

Veronica Clyatt, a Redfin agent in Pleasanton, CA, which is not far from one of the main cities responsible for this mass exodus (San Francisco), commented on this current (and growing) trend: "People who can work remotely are re-examining where they want to live, and for most of them that means they're looking at places that are less expensive. I’ve had buyers drop out of their search in the Bay Area because they're moving to Sacramento or Texas, and I've had people moving over to Pleasanton because it's less expensive than San Francisco. Everyone wants a bigger house and a bigger yard, and they want to pay less. A lot of people moving away from the Bay Area have had it in the pipeline for awhile, and remote work is accelerating the process."

As to where people are looking to move? Among the most popular picks, according to Redfin data, include Sacramento, Phoenix, and Las Vegas, respectively. Within each of these three desired locales, an average home can still be nabbed for less than half a million ($475,000).