Forbes screened more than 800 locales in the U.S. for everything from climate change risk to crime to availability of doctors. We then compared those that made the cut for what they offered in leisure pursuits—from the arts, fine dining and learning to hiking, skiing, watersports and golf.
Here are the top 25:
Are you contemplating a move away from San Diego? How about Decatur, Tupelo or Kalamazoo?
https://www.coli.org/quarter-2-2023-cost-of-living-index-released/
We did make the Top 10 Most Expensive in the first quarter:
Although a state’s housing costs can be an important consideration when deciding where to spend your post-work years, retirees should also consider another expense: health care.
As you age, you may become more reliant on health-care services. Relocating to a city or town with lower health-care costs after you retire could help you save money, Kerry Hannon, retirement expert and author of “In Control at 50+: How to Succeed in the New World of Work,” tells Bankrate.
Keep other factors in mind as well, such as whether you want to live close to family members and which kinds of activities you would like to be able to access.
“It’s a new adventure, and you should really take the time to do the prep work financially and personally so that you make smart decisions,” Hannon says in Bankrate’s report.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/12/most-expensive-us-states-to-retire-in-2023.html
If you’re considering a move out of the area, check this FEMA website for their Risk Index, Social Vulnerability, and Community Resilience:
https://hazards.fema.gov/nri/map
My downloading of last night’s show is going to take a while!
Those who left recently and now want to come back to California will have to really want to move – because it’s going to cost you, bigtime.
During the pandemic, Mike Chang, a 30-year-old founder and angel investor, moved with his wife from downtown Los Angeles to Austin. Like many others fleeing California, they grew weary of the state’s high cost of living and the increasing crime and homelessness. They were excited to live in what they saw as a dynamic, fast-growing tech hub where they could afford a big house in a safe neighborhood.
But now, three years later, they are regretting their move.
“Austin is where ambition goes to die,” Chang said. “We’d love to be in California.”
Chang, who lived in the Bay Area prior to Los Angeles, is one of several tech transplants Insider spoke to who are having second thoughts about living in Austin.
During the pandemic, Austin became a hot spot for remote workers and coastal tech employees who were in search of more space, favorable tax laws, and a lower cost of living. At the same time, tech companies like Oracle and Tesla relocated to the Austin area, and other tech giants like Facebook and Google expanded their real-estate presence in the city.
Danielle Fountain, an Austin real-estate agent, saw a flood of tech workers arriving over the past few years, mainly because of remote-work opportunities — so much that The Hills suburb of Austin was nicknamed “Silicon Hills,” she said. But as quickly as they came, many are leaving.
“I’m seeing a wave of people going back that could work from wherever when they came out here,” Fountain said. “But now they’re going back into the office.”
Insider spoke to six workers in tech who recently left Austin or are trying to relocate (two of these workers spoke to Insider on the condition of anonymity because they didn’t want to upset their employer). They cited several contributing factors, including extreme temperatures, traffic, overcrowding, and — perhaps most surprising — a middling tech scene that fails to live up to the hype.
Not long ago, Austin’s tech scene was ascendant, with national headlines suggesting it could take on Silicon Valley.
In 2019, Apple broke ground on a new $1 billion, 3-million-square-foot Austin campus, and Facebook opened a gleaming 256,500-square-foot office. In 2021, Tesla announced with great fanfare it was moving its headquarters to Austin. Elon Musk said he was moving to Austin, joining other big names in tech such as Jim Breyer of Breyer Capital; Joe Lonsdale, the cofounder of Palantir; and Bill Gurley, a general partner at Benchmark.
According to the Austin Chamber, a nonprofit that advocates for the interests of businesses in Austin, the city netted 94,764 new residents between 2020 and 2022 — ranking it first among the 50 largest metros for movers as a percentage of its 2020 total population, at 4.1%.
That injection of new residents made its mark on the city’s housing market. In May 2020, the median sale price for a home in Austin was $425,000, according to Redfin. By May 2022, it had peaked at $670,000, a nearly 58% increase.
Once you peel back the boldface names who moved to the city and the corporate announcements about flashy new headquarters, the reality of day-to-day living and working in Austin’s tech scene leaves a lot to be desired, according to those Insider spoke with.
For one thing, Musk, and even those without private jets, seem to spend very little time in the city and have shown little loyalty or civic pride, multiple people said. This year, Musk announced Tesla’s “engineering headquarters” would be in Palo Alto in what was widely seen as a rapprochement with California officials.
And even though jobs in Austin are classified as tech because they are tech companies, the job functions tend to skew toward lower-skilled jobs, like customer service and sales.
Of the 8,311 Apple employees in Austin, roughly a quarter are engineers, according to an analysis of LinkedIn data. By comparison, about half of Apple’s 52,610 employees in the Bay Area are engineers.
“I would encourage people to look at these companies like Apple, Oracle, and Tesla to look at what types of jobs are actually being created at these companies,” said Chang, who said he rarely runs into the caliber of engineers or investors in Austin that are crucial for building an early-stage startup. “The talent density is still a lot stronger in the Bay because there’s a network effect of all successful large companies that continue to get funded.”
Despite his high-profile move to Austin, Gurley said recently in an interview with Bloomberg’s Emily Chang that he doesn’t think young founders should follow in his footsteps.
“If I was a 22-year-old founder starting something I’d go to Silicon Valley because it’s going to increase your odds of success,” Gurley said, adding that it is easy for people to get distracted in Austin because they might be having too much fun and not focusing on building their businesses. “I think there’s a question whether you attract the most determined founders.”
John Andrew Entwistle moved to Austin from Westchester County, New York, after graduating high school in 2017 to start his first company, Coder. The 25-year-old, who’s now the CEO and founder of the vacation-rental company Wander, still lives there.
Wander CEO Jon Andrew Entwistle wears a gray fleece and holds a DSLR camera in front of a beautiful background of dusty mountains and valleys. Entwistle agreed that Austin has a younger and more social crowd than Silicon Valley, but he’s optimistic that the city’s tech scene will mature over time.
“You don’t have that many multi-unit, big unicorns like you do in Silicon Valley yet — it’s still an early-stage tech scene,” Entwistle told Insider. “As those companies grow and stay in the area, that dynamic obviously starts to shift a little bit.”
While Entwistle is OK with being patient, others, including Nicholas Falldine, the head of product at a software company, didn’t want to wait for Austin to bloom and lasted only a year.
He listed off a few of his displeasures with Austin, including a bad public-transportation system that led to awful traffic, subpar museums, and general overcrowding that makes it hard for any spontaneous activities — they must be booked far in advance, he said.
For the year he lived in Austin, he said there was never any payoff.
Falldine, 35, has since moved to Fayetteville, Arkansas. He acknowledged there’s not much of a tech scene there but will take that over what he perceived as Austin’s smoke and mirrors.
Falldine and his wife left Austin, Texas for Fayetteville, Arkansas. “It’s a bit fake of a scene,” he said. “Maybe it’s because everyone that lives there has moved there within the past couple of years.”
Nick Thomas, who works on the sales side, agreed that Austin doesn’t live up to the hype.
“People say it’s a tech scene just because that’s what they were told, but when you get to it, there’s no evidence for it,” Thomas told Insider. “I think it was just oversold.”
Thomas, 30, moved to Austin from downtown Los Angeles in January 2021 and is hoping to return to California soon. He said Austin is a “watered-down” version of other places he’s lived like Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Nick Thomas moved from downtown Los Angeles to Austin, but wants to move back. “It was supposed to have good food, weather, and good live music,” he said. “That’s what drew me there. Then I came to find out it didn’t really fit any of those things.”
Fountain, the real-estate agent, noted that Californians, especially, were unprepared for the weather. July was the hottest-ever month in Austin, with temperatures soaring to above 105 degrees for 11 straight days.
“When we started hitting 2022, what we started seeing was people had a whole year here in Austin and they realized they don’t like the weather,” Fountain said. “It doesn’t have what they wanted in California.”
When he lived in Los Angeles and the Bay Area, Chang said he took for granted being able to go for jogs outside or go hiking year-round. In Austin, he’s been forced to spend much of the year inside to avoid extreme temperatures and had to buy a treadmill to go running in the air conditioning.
“Literally, I can’t leave my house during the summers,” Chang said. “During the winter, it’s freezing relative to California.”
“The heat is something else,” Sam Parr, a founder and podcast host who is spending his first summer in Austin, recently tweeted. “I’m shocked how much it bums everyone out (myself included).”
Sheharyar Bokhari, a senior economist with Redfin, previously told Insider that Austin is experiencing whiplash after several years of robust buyer demand and price growth. Starter-home prices in the Lone Star state capital rose among the quickest in the country when interest rates were low, “but when interest rates went up really high and quickly, those prices were not completely sustainable,” Bokhari said.
Austin ranks No. 5 in net outward migration from big US cities from January to May of this year, according to an Insider analysis of US Postal Service data. It’s also one of only three metros in the country that’s seen a decrease in the price of starter homes — defined by Redfin as homes in the fifth to 35th percentile by sales price — since this time last year.
Since 2022, the median home price across all categories has fallen as low as $525,000 in January, signaling a possible withdrawal as some remote employees have been called back to the office and others have fled in search of affordability.
As much as Chang wants to get out of Austin, the rise in interest rates means he may have missed his chance. “If we sell, we would give up our 3% interest rate loan and would need to buy at 7%-plus, significantly reducing our buying power,” Chang said. “With housing prices being much higher in coastal cities, this makes buying nearly impossible.”
Stuck in Austin until interest rates or coastal housing prices fall, Chang has spent the summer scrolling through Instagram, envying the friends he left behind in California.
“Social media has certainly made being trapped in Austin much worse,” he said. “It’s tough watching friends frolic on the beach, go on hikes, and walk their dogs while we are stuck inside because it’s over 100 degrees.”
Link to ArticlePeople tend to move to where they have family (especially grandkids) and/or where they have lived previously – or have personal knowledge. Favorites on this list include Williamsburg, VA, Whitefish MO, Healdsburg, CA, Jacksonville, OR, and Bisbee, AZ.
https://www.daily-stuff.com/the-best-small-towns-across-america/
From jbrec.com:
We now monitor domestic migration trends in near real time, using postal address change forms that are current within a few months. This data has given us far more conviction in expressing a positive demand outlook on 15 markets and a more cautious outlook on another 15 markets, as shown below. This data excludes international migration.
Strong migration continues in:
Previously strong migration is now trending less strong than one year ago in:
Previously strong migration is now trending to barely positive migration in:
Previously strong in-migration is now trending negatively in:
Previously small out-migration is now trending as a big out-migration in:
Very negative domestic out-migration continues, which is likely somewhat offset by strong international migration, in:
https://jbrec.com/insights/real-time-migration-data-30-winners-and-losers/
Do we need to label areas as winners and losers? The migration trends are heavily influenced by the cost of housing, and it’s no surprise that the most-expensive areas are having the most people leave – which will leave those areas even more exclusive and affluent.
You can blame politics, taxes, etc. as reasons for the moves, but is comes down to this:
Rich people are staying, and not-so-rich people are leaving – and that’s ok.
Unless you are among the very affluent, you need to move out-of-state to make it worth selling your home in San Diego. If that looks inevitable, do it while you are younger and can handle the challenge! Start by going through your stuff – your kids don’t want it and will dump most everything you leave behind.
While the median distance moved in the 2022 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers was 50 miles, one-quarter of buyers traveled over 470 miles to find their new home. Traditionally, buyers have stayed close to their past homes. From 1989 to 2021, the median distance moved was just 10 to 15 miles.
Based on this generational trend, it is not surprising that those who moved more than 470 miles from their past residence were more likely to be repeat home buyers. Just 11% were first-time buyers. This dispels one potential myth that has abounded in the last year: that first-time buyers are the ones making the move to find their first property far from their rental unit. It does happen, but it is more likely a repeat buyer who is making the distance move.
https://www.nar.realtor/blogs/economists-outlook/long-distance-movers-why-did-they-move-and-how
San Diego’s market has to be as hot as any of these, and at a much-higher price point!
The national housing market might be in a slump, but some areas are sizzling like a summer heat wave.
For proof, look no further than the Realtor.com® June roundup of the Hottest Housing Markets. This month, the Hartford, CT, metropolitan area tops the list, followed by hottest markets stalwarts Manchester, NH, and Concord, NH.
To make the “hottest” list, a metro area must have a higher number of page views on Realtor.com, and a faster pace of selling, than in other areas of the country.
Four of the 20 hottest markets were in Connecticut in June, including Norwich, New Haven, Bridgeport, and, of course, Hartford. Many folks who moved to Hartford during the COVID-19 pandemic for the cheaper prices are now commuting to their offices in the New York City and Boston areas twice a week, says Hartford-area real estate agent Lisa Barall-Matt, who’s with Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices.
House hunters aren’t just drawn to the lower prices, but the lifestyle as well.
“They’re looking for a place to raise families,” she says. “Younger buyers are looking for a place where they can walk to the center and dine outside, meet their friends, have lovely parks to go to. We’ve got beautiful beaches and lakes, all kinds of nice outdoor places.” That includes the Atlantic Ocean and multiple state and national forests and parks, all within an hour’s drive.
Hartford also boasts plenty of employment opportunities, including being the state capital and the unofficial hub of the insurance industry. Companies such as Aetna, The Travelers Companies, and Synchrony Financial all have offices there.
Recently, Barall-Matt says, she has helped buyers relocate from as far away as California, Florida, and Alabama.
One caveat: The number of homes for sale is still very low. So all that demand is making market conditions just as crazy as during the height of the pandemic. Recently, one of her buyers was in a bidding war with 36 other buyers, and lost to a higher bid, despite offering $45,000 over the asking price.
Hartford-area homes spent just 18 days on the market in June, less than half the national median.
Here we go again – people don’t want to leave San Diego! It will be interesting to see if this hot summer throughout the country causes more of the affluent people to head our way.
Based on an analysis of 100 metro areas, the following 10 cities had the highest net inflow of property searches on Redfin’s website. Net inflow is the number of people looking to move into a city minus the number of people looking to leave.
Las Vegas: 5,700
Phoenix: 5,300
Tampa, Florida: 5,000
Orlando, Florida: 4,900
Sacramento, California: 4,800
North Port-Sarasota, Florida: 4,700
Cape Coral, Florida: 4,100
Dallas: 4,100
Miami: 3,700
Houston: 3,600
For all cities on this list, the largest number of potential out-of-town homebuyers are from either Los Angeles, Seattle, New York or Chicago, according to the study. This makes sense, as those are some of the cities where the most homebuyers seemingly want to leave.
Here are the 10 metros with the largest net outflow of property searches, which measures the number of search queries interested in leaving a metro area minus the number of search queries about moving to that same city.
San Francisco: 28,100
New York City: 24,200
Los Angeles: 20,900
Washington, D.C.: 15,700
Chicago: 4,900
Boston: 4,400
Seattle: 3,900
Hartford, Connecticut: 3,500
Denver: 2,300
Detroit: 2,300
The search patterns suggest homebuyers are looking to leave large coastal hubs for cities in low-tax states that have considerably cheaper home prices.
For instance, most out-of-town buyers looking for properties in Las Vegas are from Los Angeles. The median cost of a home in Las Vegas is $412,500 as of June, nearly half the $975,000 median cost for homes in Los Angeles, according to Redfin’s data.
For the purposes of the study, a person browsing Redfin counts as a migrant if they’ve viewed 10 properties in another city over the three months ending June 2023. The net inflow and outflow rankings were compiled based on the total number of migrants.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/30/1-in-4-us-homebuyers-want-to-move-to-a-new-city.html
Are you looking for an experienced agent to help you buy or sell a home?
Contact Jim the Realtor!
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