Everyone Wants To Move To Sacramento

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Everyone Wants To Move To Sacramento

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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.

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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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Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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