San Francisco Residents Flocking To Montana As Demand Has “Exploded”

The great exodus out of California continues!

Specifically, in today’s episode we note that people from San Francisco are flocking to Montana, which has seen a 140% increase from Fog City when comparing total moves from 2018-2019 and 2020-2021, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

“I have a vacation rental [in Bozeman],” said Bozeman real estate broker Cancis Dorsch, who’s spent years selling vacation homes to Bay Area residents and says that demand from the Bay Area has ‘exploded.’

“It became slam-booked for the entire summer. Buyers were making phone calls, buyers were buying properties, sight unseen, to get out of the Bay Area. It really happened in the very beginning, and never really stopped.”

During the same time period as above, overall moves from the Bay Area to Montana increased by 51% according to data on migration patterns produced by the California Policy Lab based out of the University of California.

The data tracks movements of all Californian adults with active credit information. In order to analyze moves over the same time periods, we looked at data from the first seven quarters of 2020-2021 and compared them to the same period in 2018-2019. -SF Chronicle

That said, while the percentage increase from SF to Montana may have jumped – in terms of raw numbers, there were only 360 total moves from San Francisco to Montana in 2020 and the first three quarters of 2021. Still, “while San Francisco saw the biggest pandemic-era percent increase to Montana, all 10 of California’s most populous counties saw move-outs to the state increase significantly,” according to the report, which notes that based on the 32 counties with enough data to track movements, at least 13,000 Californians moved to Montana over the last two years.

Fewer people moving to California

During the pandemic, the rate of people migrating out of the Golden State accelerated – contributing to a decade-long trend of out-migration, according to California Policy Lab Executive Director, Evan White.

“There’s been a slow decline in net entrances for a long time,” he said, adding “What appears to have happened in the pandemic was the slope of the line changed.”

This statewide trend is driven largely by a decrease in moves into California, not moves out of it. Moves into California decreased by about 35% between the pre-pandemic period we looked at and the pandemic period, while moves out increased by only about 7% during that same period. -SF Chronicle

According to the report, San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara saw the biggest net move-outs as a percentage of the population during the pandemic.

Of course, the state which takes the cake when it comes to ex-Californians in general is Texas, one of nine states which doesn’t have an individual income tax.

Will it be enough to eventually turn these red states blue?