Who Is Moving And Why?

On today’s show we’re talking about where your future tenants are going to come from. Last week the US Census Bureau published new data on migration across the US.

It shows some new trends that are quite frankly a reversal of some long term historic trends.

If you think back to the time of your grandparents or great grandparents, they probably grew up in the family homestead community and they married and started their own family in the same community, probably the same neighborhood.

My father’s family lived in the same community on an island for nearly 400 years. They were displaced by the Second World War. Were it not for that, my father probably would have ended up taking over his father’s Pharmacy and continued the family business.

As modern transportation increased and mobility became easier, so too did migration of people. Migration, that is the percentage of people who move their primary residence has been increasing generally with each passing decade. That is, until now.

In the latest census report, we’re seeing a reversal of migration trends in the past decade since the start of the Great Recession. But I don’t think you can blame this on the Recession itself. Because even as the economic recovery has taken hold, migration has continued to decline steadily across the US.

If you have a brand new vacant apartment ready for someone to rent, or a recently renovated property for sale, people have to be willing to move in order for you to rent your apartment, or buy your house. If the mobility in the population is declining, it stands to reason that there will be fewer people looking to move into your property.

So let’s look at the data.

The Census Bureau looked at a data set of 263M people over 15 years of age. Of those, 238M didn’t move in the past year and about 25M people did move.

That’s about 10.5% of the population. That sounds like a lot. But it’s a significant decline compared with the previous decade when

In 1985, nearly 20 percent of Americans had changed their residence within the preceding 12 months, but by 2018, fewer than ten percent had. That’s the lowest level since 1948, when the Census Bureau first started tracking mobility.

The largest group of movers by age are in the range of 15 to 24 years of age where 17% of people in that age range moved in the past year. This makes sense. College choice is a big driver of that need to move.

The older you get, the less people move. Only 4% of those over 65 years of age moved in the past year.

11% of those between 25 and 64 years of age moved.

Your inclination to move also depends on where you live. The lowest mobility part of the US is the NE where less than 8% moved in the past year. 10.73% moved in the midwest and 11.2% moved in the South and the West.

Income also seems to be a factor.

Those with no income had one of the highest inclinations to move with 11.55% of those people moving. The lowest percentage of movers were those having incomes above $100,000 with only 8.5% of those people moving.

Only 3.7% of the people who moved in 2018 came from outside the country.

Of those coming from abroad, men were more likely to move than women, with men making up 3.9% of those who moved compared with 3.4% who were women.

81% of people who moved stayed within the same state and 15.5% of those who moved went to another state.

So if you’re looking for new tenants and you can target your product offer or your marketing message, it pays to take a closer look at the demographic information in the census data.