A recent study by the real estate website Redfin pointed out that 25% of Americans would like to move from where they live now. That may be the highest figure ever. The city where the most people in the study wanted to move was Sacramento, CA. It is an odd result because most of the other cities on the list are much bigger based on population.
Specifically, 24.3% of Americans said they wanted to move based on data gathered in the three months that ended at the close of October. The comparable number in October 2019 was 18.3%. The quarterly figure was even lower as the measurement traces preference as far back as August 2017.
Among the reasons people continue to buy homes despite rising mortgage rates is that people who work from home have an unprecedented chance to move where they would like to and not where they have to because of office locations. People are also moving to cities with warm weather. A number of the metros on the Redfin study of where people would like to live are in the south or warm parts of the southwest.
Redfin used a crude method to pick the cities people wanted to move to. It took search data that showed metros people wanted to move to and subtracted searches of people who wanted to leave. The cities were not weighted based on population.
Las Vegas, Miami, Tampa, Phoenix, Dallas, and Orlando were near the top of the list. But Sacramento bested all of them. The capital of California has posted a population increase every ten years, based on the Census. It had 525,00 residents in 2020. That compares to 275,000 in 1980.
Why Sacramento? It is not terribly expensive to live there. The median household income is $75,000, which is slightly more than the national average. Median home price is $450,000. Maybe the city is attractive because it is not far from California’s much more expensive coastal cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Jose. That is as good a guess as any other.
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