US Renters Migrate Toward Feeder Cities

Key takeaways:

• Irving and Lewisville in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex were the nation’s top cities at luring in renters in 2021, as a percentage of population
• Millennials are the generation most on the move across the US, including 72% of the renters swapping New York City for Jersey City
• Moving to a smaller city can get renters considerably more living space — New Yorkers gain 33% more home when relocating to Orlando, FL, and 18% more when moving to Irving, TX
• Former ‘flyover country’ is becoming sought after — South Dakota and North Dakota are among the states seeing double the number of incoming compared to outgoing renters

Americans were on the move last year, adapting to changing job opportunities, expanding household sizes and pandemic restrictions. And, according to our most recent research of US migration patterns, renter interest grew stronger, with a 10% increase in renter applications in 2021 versus 2020. Some big urban hubs still attracted large renter cohorts, but smaller cities nearby stole the limelight as preferred destinations for apartment hunters.

As renting and self storage often go hand in hand, we were interested to see which are today’s renter havens, the cities that both attract and retain renter populations. To this end, the analysts at StorageCafe looked into 3.4M rental applications from RentGrow from 2021, illustrating renter interest across 257 markets with populations of over 100,000. We determined preferred migration destinations based on their applications, and we determined each destination city’s relative ranking for net renter migration — inbound minus outbound — as a proportion of its population. To get a further impression of a city’s popularity, we also looked at how many times its inbound migration was larger than its outbound. In addition, we examined demographics and changes in median income and average home size square footage that result from the moves.

Texas, and the Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex in particular, strongly attracted incoming renters, just as they have been drawing in developers of storage and pretty much every other type of real estate. Communities a few miles out from the centers of metropolitan areas — and acting as ‘feeder’ cities, as their residents often commute — experienced some of the highest influxes of renters in relation to their population numbers.

To read more: https://www.storagecafe.com/blog/us-renters-migrate-toward-feeder-cities-with-dallas-suburbs-biggest-renter-magnets/