23% Of Professionals Have Relocated Out Of A Major City

By ValueWalk

February 10, 2021

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By Jacob Wolinsky. Originally published at ValueWalk.

23% of professionals have relocated out of a major city & share where they’re moving to

Q4 2020 hedge fund letters, conferences and more

The “Silicon Valley Exodus” has been a prominent discussion for months. Back in May, Blind asked tech professionals, “If you had a choice to WFH as much as you would like, would you consider relocating?” The survey was opened to the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, and Seattle Area. Through these results, we learned that 66% of professionals on Blind would consider relocating (Download full report here: The Permanent relocation).

This week, we followed up to see where those 66% of professionals currently are.

We asked 6,135 professionals between 1/29/21-2/08/21:

Since WFH began, have you relocated out of a major city?
Where did you move away from?
Where did you move to?

Professionals Have Relocated Out Of A Major City

Key learnings:

Since WFH began, 23% of professionals have relocated out of a major city.
- 19% of professionals responded, “not yet.”
- 39% of Bloomberg professionals have relocated out of a major city
- 35% of Linkedin professionals have relocated out of a major city
- 37% of Twitter professionals have relocated out of a major city
Of the 23% of professionals that have relocated out of a major city:
- 47% moved away from the SF/ Bay Area
- 14% moved away from NYC
- 16% moved away from Seattle
- 22% moved away to “other cities,” which included:
  - Austin, Los Angeles, Miami, Raleigh, Boston, and Dallas
- Of the 23% of professionals that have relocated out of a major city:
  - 7% moved to Miami
  - 15% moved to Austin
  - 9% moved to Seattle
  - 4% moved to Arizona
  - 66% moved to “other cities,” which included:
    - Atlanta, Denver, Nashville, Honolulu, and “exploring the US in a minivan while WFH from Airbnb.”

See the data here.

The departures of companies like Tesla, Oracle, and HPE have many people questioning the future of Silicon Valley and California as a tech hub. And while only 23% of professionals have relocated to date, it’s still certainly a subject on tech CEOs’ minds as they ponder a post-pandemic future.