Snowbirds Make Up One in Five New Yorkers Looking to Leave Town

One in ten New Yorkers looking to leave are searching in Florida

According to Redfin’s fourth quarter migration data, over a third of New Yorkers searching Redfin’s real estate listing website were looking to leave the area, up just slightly from a year prior. Their top destination? Boston. Just under 15 percent of those looking to leave New York were searching in the Boston area. Rounding out the top five were Atlanta (10%), Philadelphia (9%), Washington, DC (7%) and Los Angeles (6%).

One in five New Yorkers looking for homes outside the metro area are potential snowbirds (up slightly from 19 percent a year earlier), looking for homes in warmer southern locales in Florida, Arizona, and Southern California such as Miami (6%), Phoenix (2%) and San Diego (1%). Cities in Florida alone make up 10 percent of the locations where departing New Yorkers are searching (unchanged from a year earlier).

“A lot of retirees leave New York because the cost of living is so much lower in other places,” said New York Redfin listing agent Martin Freiman. “Many of them are also looking for more land or a warmer climate, so they end up in places like Florida and Arizona.”

The West Coast barely registers in the minds of New Yorkers, with destinations in California, Oregon and Washington adding up to less than the share of New Yorkers looking in Boston alone. The major tech centers of the San Francisco Bay Area and Seattle only attracted 3 percent and 2 percent of New Yorkers looking to leave.