Bank of America drops bombshell MIGRATION report (the U.S. map just flipped)

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]One of the biggest migration flips in US history is happening as we speak. This flip is seeing people leave a certain part of America and move in to another part of America in a migration trend that we have not seen for the last five decades. People moving out of the west coast of the US into the Midwest. In addition, we're also seeing fewer people move into the South. In particular, Midwest migration just spiked to its highest level in nearly 35 years. This is the first positive figure in the Midwest on record going back to 1991.

[00:00:35]Meanwhile, on the West Coast of the US, migration has plunged into negative territory since the pandemic hit and has stayed there, marking the worst migration downturn in the West Coast's history. And what I think this could be a sign of is a potential long-term shift in US demographics, US real estate, and US migration. In this video, I'm going to lay out a case for where the Midwest is now going to become an area that's more desirable, is now going to become an area that more people move to. And as a result, there'll be fewer people moving into the south and west coast of the US. And Bank of America actually just released an interesting study on this that I think you guys should all pay attention to. And what Bank of America did is they broke out where people were moving by income level. And they found using their own internal data that highincome households especially are disproportionately moving to Midwest metro areas. You can see these blue bars represent higher inome households. And where is that migration highest? It's in Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, Oklahoma City, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Grand Rapids, Michigan, Cleveland, and Minneapolis.

[00:01:40]These are the markets with the biggest highincome migration from the first quarter of 2025 to the first quarter of 2026. Comparatively at the other end of the spectrum, boomtown markets like Las Vegas, Denver, Austin, Nashville, Phoenix, and Dallas, as well as Tampa have very little highinccome migration over the last 12 months. And what it seems like today is that more and more people are moving with their feet in favor of affordability than in the past.

[00:02:09]Maybe five years or 10 years ago, people wouldn't have thought as much about how much it costs to buy a house in a city or how much it costs to rent before moving there. Well, now they are, and this is benefiting the Midwest as a result. For instance, you can see data from Reenture app shows the cost to buy a house in different states compared to local income. You could see these Midwest states are all in blue, meaning lower home buyer costs. In Ohio, in Indiana, in Iowa, and Kentucky, and West Virginia, it costs around 28 to 29% of the local income to afford mortgage payments. That is much cheaper than the West Coast of the US. On the West Coast, you cannot really buy a house if you're the average household and spend less than 40% of your gross income on a mortgage. In California, it's 62%. In Nevada, it's 41%. In Colorado, it's 43%.

[00:03:00]In Washington, it's 46%. Now, what's interesting about the West Coast specifically is that the West Coast is heavily geared to what's going on in California. California is losing a lot of people. And in 2025, California lost 229,000 net people due to outbound migration.

[00:03:19]That was the biggest loss of any state in the US by far. It was nearly double the loss of New York and nearly six times the loss of Illinois. However, here's what's different today. What's different today is that a state like Colorado was also losing people minus 12,000. Colorado was always a positive migration state for the last 30 years.

[00:03:39]Through about 2020, Colorado added 20 to 40,000 people every year, more Americans moving in than out. But something happened after the pandemic. It dropped close to zero and in 2025 it went negative. In addition, a place like Washington also used to be heavily in positive territory prior to the pandemic, but now it's either negative or close to zero with a similar trend occurring in Nevada. Nevada's inbound migration numbers have also plummeted to close to the lowest level in 15 years.

[00:04:08]And so we have a situation of California still losing, but California's losses now also spreading to other states on the West Coast. And this is what's different this time around. We haven't really seen the western side of the US take a nose dive like this in migration in the last 40 years. And I think this could completely reshape the West Coast housing market because the cost of buying there is so expensive. And the cost of buying was predicated on the fact that people would keep moving in and that it was relatively easy to get a good highpaying job in tech and to have a good highpaying remote job. But now we're seeing a shift. And the shift we're seeing today is that there's a a underlying movement in the economy from software to hardware due to the AI boom.

[00:04:57]The AI boom is making certain uh remote jobs in tech and finance and marketing a bit redundant and some of the big corporations are doing layoffs. As a result of those layoffs, what I think is happening is there's now an economic weakness showing up on the west coast of the US which is turning into an economic strength in the Midwest. Because in the last three or four years in the US, we've had a big surge in factory construction. You can see spending on manufacturing facilities in the US started skyrocketing in 2022 and peaked in 2024 and has dipped a bit, but is still more than uh about 3x the long-term average. And one map that kind of shows this and illustrates this, how the Midwest and parts of the Deep South actually are disproportionately benefiting from more manufacturing facilities, more data centers, is this map, which shows the location of car manufacturing facilities in the US. And you could see that the disproportionate amount of car manufacturing facilities are in states like Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Kansas, as well as down into Kentucky, and some parts of the South. Some parts of the deep south including Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi also have a lot of car manufacturing. But more or less the manufacturing base in the US is in this region specifically and you can see that further supported by this map which is looking at metro areas on their percentage of manufacturing jobs in the local economy. The more orange the metro is, the more manufacturing jobs there are as a percentage of total jobs. And so this is where we're seeing some of the economic shift take place in the US right now. Notice the West Coast has almost no manufacturing jobs outside of actually San Jose, which has a decent amount of manufacturing, as well as some parts of northern Utah and lower Idaho.

[00:06:44]There's almost no manufacturing. Almost all the manufacturing takes place in the Midwest, Northeast Rust Belt, which is now having a massive impact on local housing markets. Inventory in the South and West Coast is rising while it's plummeting in the Midwest. And we're seeing the knock-on effect happen with home prices because on this map, we're looking at states ranked by home value growth in the last year. The redder the state is, the better the home value growth. What are the top states for home value growth? North Dakota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Midwest states have the highest home value growth in the last 12 months. So, this is already happening.

[00:07:24]Now, where are the states with the lowest home value growth or negative home value growth? They're on the West Coast. Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Arizona, Colorado contracting home values year-over-year. In addition, Texas, Georgia, and Florida, as well as North Carolina also have contracting home values. Is it isn't just the West Coast that's now seeing reduced migration. It's also the South, this belt here. Now, the south situation is a little bit better than the west coast because the south at least is still adding people. In 2025, the south still had positive migration, but you can see in percentage terms the domestic migration into the south in 2025 was near the lowest level on record. It was right at those lows that we saw in ' 09 to 2013 after the GFC. So, we had the big spike in people moving into the south that occurred during the pandemic.

[00:08:13]Then, we've had a big downturn in people moving into the south. Now, I think the South is better set up than the West long term because the South, I think, is still a very desirable place to move and it's still more affordable than the West Coast and it actually still has a lot of that manufacturing base in certain states like Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi. So, if we do continue to see more of the manufacturing and data center construction, if we do continue to see more onshoring of jobs and uh continuation of some tariffs, the south will benefit to some degree. Now, I'm going to speculate a bit here about where the economy is heading in the future because I think this could explain some of the migration trends we're already seeing, some of the housing market trends we're already seeing, and maybe where the market's going in the future. And what I think we're going to see is a subtle shift in the US economy more towards hardware, more towards manufacturing. We're seeing it already with tariffs. We're seeing it with the geopolitical tensions and the war. There's more and more interest in developing products here in the US. Uh and we're seeing that happen. We're seeing them factories get built. We're seeing military defense spending go up.

[00:09:25]And where is the benefit of that? It's areas with the existing manufacturing infrastructure which are in the Midwest and parts of the deep south. And I suspect that this is going to continue into the future and that we could be exiting a period of the last 40 years which was a very unique period where information technology tech was the dominant driving force in the US economy. Uh I think it's going to be less of a driving force in the future and as a result there's going to be a realignment in terms of where people move. There's going to be a realignment in terms of economic might and a realignment in terms of local housing markets. If we go back to this mortgage payment to income map, you could see something pretty alarming and that's that in states like Tennessee and North Carolina, the mortgage payment to income ratio is north of 35%. And again, mortgage payment to income totals up mortgage interest, taxes, and insurance divides it by the incomes of the local population. And you know, 35 36% mortgage payment to income. that's now almost as expensive as Arizona and Nevada. You know, in these states in the Southeast, they were supposed to be affordable. They used to be affordable, but in North Carolina's case, the mortgage payment to income has gone way above the long-term norm. It's getting a little bit better, but still that 29% average. We're way off from that. Before the pandemic, mortgage payment to income was 25% in North Carolina. And so that's I think another issue for these southern states is that they used to be affordable.

[00:10:53]Five, six years ago, it was a no-brainer to move to Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, or Georgia and buy a house. And that lack of affordability and degraded affordability is of course going to put some downward pressure on people moving in because the math just doesn't make as much sense as it used to. And what I think is really interesting about all this is how the data from different sources align with each other. On one hand, we have the domestic migration data from the US Census Bureau, which I've been showing you throughout this video. That migration data is showing a big drop in people moving in to both the South and West and the West Coast going negative.

[00:11:28]On the other hand, I'm showing you inventory in listings data from realtor.com, which is showing that listings in the south and west are surging and that inventory is now higher than it was before the pandemic, and that home value data from Zillow is corroborating that values are now dropping in those states. So, if three different independent data sources measuring different things, all agreeing on the fact that there's a shift down in the South and West and a shift up in the Midwest. And I think that's the proof to me that something is actually going on here, that that this isn't just a blip on the radar is these three different sources all corroborating the same story. And from a home buyer standpoint or an investor standpoint, why this is really important to you is that uh you're going to want to know, you know, if your region is set up to go up in the future or go down in the future, just more broadly like uh a state like Ohio or Illinois might have used to be viewed kind of negatively from a real estate standpoint. It might be viewed much more positively over the next 10 years, though. Uh, on the flip side, Nevada or Colorado was viewed very positively 10 years ago. It might not be viewed so positively the next 10 years. So, I want to prepare you guys all for maybe a big shift coming in narrative on the housing market. And this has been a shift I've been kind of warning you the last two or three years and turns out I've been right that the narrative is going to start changing about where it's good to buy a house. And the narrative is going to start changing about where people are moving. And I want you all to be prepared for that narrative shift. I don't want you to be alarmed by it. I want you to expect that that's going to happen because that's what the data is saying. Now, we need to talk about Florida real quick and we need to talk about Texas because those two states which are in the south are also seeing a big drop in domestic migration. Fewer people moving into these areas.

[00:13:21]Migration into Florida is down 93% from the pandemic peak. You could see we're now at some of the lowest migration figures in Florida as of 2025 going back 15 years. So really low migration in Florida, still positive in 2025, just not enough to sustain Florida's market.

[00:13:38]In addition, in Texas, you could see a big drop in migration as well. In 2025 in Texas, we had the lowest domestic migration since 2005, actually 20 years.

[00:13:48]And what I encourage you guys to do is actually check out this data for your county. This on Reventure app, we've added the domestic migration data for every county in the US as well going back 35 years. So you're going to want to know two things. Number one, what's the domestic migration number for my county? Is it positive or is it negative? You can see in the case of Williamson County here in Tennessee, it's positive, but it's gone down a lot.

[00:14:11]The next thing you're going to want to know is what's that domestic migration as a percentage of the local population, showing you essentially the growth rate and how has that growth rate changed over time. In the case of Clark County, Nevada, you can see the domestic migration growth rate keeps trending down, which is going to be problematic for Nevada's housing market. Now, on the other end of the spectrum, there's some areas in South Carolina, like Spartanberg, where the migration's surging through the roof, and we're at the highest level in 30 years, which of course is going to have a big long-term impact on the housing market. So, what I encourage you guys to do if you're a serious home buyer, investor, you want to understand these migration trends, how your area ranks, how it could impact where your area is going to go in the future, download Revententur's mobile app or go to ww.reventure.app app and upgrade to see these data points on domestic migration under investor metrics. We source this data directly from the US Census Bureau. It's the best real-time and long-term data on migration. You're not going to want to make a home buying or investment decision without understanding the migration for your