About 88,000 people moved to the Phoenix metro area from 2014 to 2015, the fourth largest gain among other U.S. metros, according to U.S. Census data. Growing at a rate of 2 percent from the previous year, the population now stands at over 4.5 million.
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 Phoenix metro area from.
Moving to Phoenix
Specifically the data looks at inbound county migration to Maricopa County, which contains the city of Phoenix, as well as Scottsdale and Mesa.
A whopping 77 percent of people moving to Maricopa County originated from another state.
The remaining 23 percent came from somewhere else in Arizona.
Here are the top places where people are moving to the Phoenix-area from:
- Los Angeles County, CA
- Clark County, NV
- San Diego County, CA
- Cook County, IL
- Orange County, CA
- El Paso County, CO
- Riverside County, CA
- Salt Lake County, UT
- King County, WA
- Utah County, UT
More than 129,000 people moved to Maricopa County from out-of-state from 2009 to 2013. Meanwhile 38,600 moved from another county in Arizona.
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 Phoenix from currently.
To compile our list, we looked at the number of Sparefoot.com searchers for storage in the Atlanta metro area from April 2015 through March 2016. We also found the top ten places those searches originated from.
To compile our list, we looked at the number of searches for storage in the Phoenix metro area from April 2015 through March 2016. We also looked at where those searches originated from.
Based on our analysis, Los Angeles continues to be a major contributor of new residents to the Phoenix area. Searchers in Los Angeles made up 48 percent of searchers in the top ten out-of-area places people were searching from. For this analysis, the Los Angeles metro also includes Orange County, CA searches.
Below are the top ten cities:
Top 10 MSA’s by number of searches for storage in Phoenix / Percent share of top 10
| 1. Los Angeles-Riverside-Orange County CA | 48% |
| 2. San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose CA | 10% |
| 3. Seattle-Tacoma-Bremerton WA | 7% |
| 4. Tucson AZ | 6% |
| 5. New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island | 6% |
| 6. Chicago-Gary-Kenosha IL-IN-WI | 6% |
| 7. Denver-Boulder-Greeley CO | 5% |
| 8. San Diego CA | 4% |
| 9. Dallas-Fort Worth TX | 4% |
| 10. Las Vegas NV-AZ | 4% |
We believe that storage searches made from one city for storage space in another city likely indicates intent to relocate to that city. As you can see, the top places indicated by the Census data make an appearance in our top ten. While there is some variation, it looks like historical migration patterns to Phoenix are continuing.
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