Moving is the cornerstone of the real estate business, so moving trends—aka residential mobility—are important for agents to note and understand in order to best serve their markets.
In recent years, however, mobility has seen some unprecedented shifts due to the pandemic. A new study from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies (JCHS) Senior Research Analyst Riordan Frost takes a look at pandemic era moving trends to decipher exactly how the pandemic affected residential mobility.
Frost dives in by first noting that the swift upward shift in moving trends at the start of the pandemic did slightly offset the long-term downtrend seen in residential mobility.
Surrounding the pandemic, residential mobility was much slower, but the onset of the pandemic caused a quick and “fleeting” rise in moving trends. Frost points out that temporary address change requests reported by USPS shot up almost 200% from March 2019 to March 2020, and permanent requests grew 12%.
“In addition to many of these moves being temporary, these requests became less frequent in later months, resulting in only small increases in the number of people moving in 2020 compared to 2019,” Frost added.
Frost then notes that mobility returned to its downward trend in 2021 and 2022 (still considered the pandemic era), and the census Current Population Survey data indicated a fall in 2024 (post-pandemic) to a historically low rate of 8.2%.
The next data trend observed in the study is the return to regular household shifts across state lines, following a sharp pandemic increase.
Interstate migration usually accounts for less than 20% of moves, as Frost states, but saw a significant rise during the pandemic. The household interstate migration rate rose from 2.1% pre-pandemic to 2.3% in 2021 and 2.5% in 2022. In total, 700,000 more households moved across state lines than would have if normal trends continued.
Frost noted that the 2021 increase was “entirely due to remote worker householders, who both became more numerous and moved across state lines at a higher rate,” while the 2022 increase was “driven by commuter householders as remote work became less common.”
Like mobility trends, households moving across state lines also decreased after the pandemic to 2.2% in 2023.
The lock-in effect is something on the minds of many in the industry right now, and Frost noted this effect in the data from his study. He states that the lock-in effect has put a damper on residential mobility post-pandemic.
“Historically low interest rates prompted many to purchase a home during the pandemic—especially millennials, who were at prime homebuying ages and contributed to a sharp rise in first-time homebuying,” Frost stated.
Specifically, the homeowner household mobility rate grew from 6.2% in 2019 to 6.8% in 2021, the highest rate in more than a decade. This growth fizzled out in 2021, and began to drop in 2022 with the increase of mortgage rates.
“As interest rates rose starting in 2022, millions of homeowner households with low interest rates experienced a lock-in effect and homeowner mobility fell sharply to 5.5% in 2023,” Frost continued. “This decline counteracted the recovery in renter mobility that year, and the overall mobility rate continued its downward trend.”
One pandemic trend that has continued is the movement of people to less-dense communities. Frost stated that starting in 2020 there have been large movements of homeowners into lower-density suburban, smaller metro and non-metro counties, which has continued through to 2024.
The domination of the Sunbelt in terms of regional migration is one trend that hasn’t seen any shift before, during or after the pandemic.
Frost observed that the states with the highest average net inflows during the pandemic were all in the Sunbelt, led by Florida, Texas, North Carolina and Arizona. This trend continued in the region following the pandemic, led by Texas, Florida, North Carolina, and South Carolina.
However, Frost noted that there were notable shifts in states in the Midwest and Northeast, which “may be evidence of a coming shift in migration toward ‘Snow Belt’ states.”
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