Miami’s sunny weather and carefree lifestyle attracts people from all over the country to relocate here.
The Miami metro population grew 1.3 percent from 2014 to 2015, reaching a population of more than 6 million people
That got us at SpareFoot curious to find out where all these people are moving from, so we looked further back at some other Census data from 2009-2013 that shows the different places people moved to the Miami metro area from.
Moving to Miami
Specifically, we looked at data for county to county migration to Miami-Dade County.
It turns out that 48 percent of people moving to Miami-Dade County are moving from another county in Florida.
The remaining 52 percent came from somewhere out-of-state:
Here are the top 10 out-of-state places where people are moving to the Miami-area from. Note that the movement is heavily concentrated in the New York City-area as Census figures report each borough separately:
- New York County, NY (Manhattan)
- Kings County, NY (Brooklyn)
- Passaic County, NJ (Paterson)
- Los Angeles County, CA
- Bronx County, NY
- Cook County, IL (Chicago)
- Queens County, NY
- Fulton County, GA (Atlanta)
- San Juan, PR
- Suffolk County, MA (Boston)
More than 31,100 people moved to Miami County from out-of-state from 2009 to 2013. Meanwhile 28,800 moved from another county in Florida.
All that movement generates demand for local self-storage facilities.
Current Trends
We looked at our own data to see where people are moving to Miami from currently.
To compile our list, we looked at the number of Sparefoot.com searches for storage in the Miami metro area from April 2015 through March 2016. We also found the top ten places those searches originated from.
Based on our analysis, Orlando is the top city where people are likely to be moving to Miami from, followed by West Palm Beach. The New York Metro area came in third place, searchers there made up 16 percent of the top ten.
Below are the top ten cities:
Top 10 MSA’s by number of searches for storage in Miami / Percent share of top 10
| Orlando FL MSA | 28% |
| West Palm Beach-Boca Raton FL MSA | 20% |
| New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island | 16% |
| Atlanta GA MSA | 11% |
| Washington-Baltimore DC-MD-VA-WV CMSA | 6% |
| Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater FL MSA | 4% |
| San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose CA CMSA | 4% |
| Los Angeles-Riverside-Orange County CA | 4% |
| Lakeland-Winter Haven FL MSA | 3% |
| Chicago-Gary-Kenosha IL-IN-WI CMSA | 3% |
We believe that storage searches made from one city for storage space in another city likely indicates intent to relocate to that city.
From our data it looks like New York City continues to be the top out-of-state source of movers to the Miami area, followed by Atlanta and Washington D.C.. From within Florida, our data also shows a large percentage of likely movers coming from nearby West Palm Beach, FL.
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