Bradenton-Sarasota ranks as a top 10 US growth area in the past year, U-Haul says
Bradenton-Sarasota ranked as the No. 10 growth area in America in 2021, based on U-Haul truck moves during the year.
The number of people coming to Bradenton-Sarasota in one-way U-Haul trucks jumped more than 33% year-over-year, while departures rose 29% from 2020.
Or as Patrick Canty, a U-Haul neighborhood dealer in Bradenton, and owner of Premier Motorsports & Imports puts it, “There was a huge migration, particularly in March, April and May. There were a lot of people moving back and forth.”
People moving into the area came primarily from the Midwest and New York, he said.
Canty also saw significant movement of 70-something retirees, who were “re-retiring” from Bradenton to South Carolina.
Some were also moving to Nevada, California and Washington, but “never to the Midwest,” he said.
Arriving customers accounted for 51.3% of all one-way U-Haul traffic in Bradenton-Sarasota during 2021 to keep it a leading market for do-it-yourself movers.
While the Bradenton-Sarasota market did not make the top 25 list for 2020, it was No. 7 among growth cities in 2019 and 17th in 2018 – a pattern that speaks to its consistent appeal to do-it-yourself movers targeting Florida as their home.
“The Sarasota-Bradenton area offers access to world-renowned beaches, warm weather and endless recreational amenities,” Dave Thompson, U-Haul Company of Western Florida president, said in the U-Haul press release. “There are amazing islands just a stone’s throw away that people flock to every weekend. Anyone who enjoys the water will be hard-pressed to find a better place to live, even in Florida.”
Moving is big business
All the new arrivals and departures have had an affect on the availability of rental trucks, as well as on the real estate market, apartment rentals and storage units.
The Bradenton area has seen a boom in the construction of new self storage units to accommodate new residents.
In June, Mike Snipes, an economics instructor at USF Sarasota-Manatee, said that all the new self storage locations are a classic example of supply and demand related to the housing boom.
“We have so many houses changing hands now,” Snipes said. New residents and current residents changing houses often need a place to store their belongings while they are in transition, a process that can take months.”
Record housing prices
The heavy influx of new residents has driven housing prices to record highs. In November, the median price for an existing single family house in the Bradenton area hit $450,000, a cool $100,000 than the median price for the same month a year earlier.
At the same time, investors have been gobbling up apartment complexes, making them the biggest real estate deals of 2021.
In September, New York business research firm AdvisorSmith Solutions, Inc. reported that rents in the Bradenton area ranked eighth on the list of least-affordable small American cities.
The AdvisorSmith Solutions study took into account the average weighted rent in Bradenton of $1,509 and the median household income of $46,776. With 9,218 rental households in Bradenton, the rent-to-income ratio is 38.7%, compared with the national average of 25% for small cities nationwide, according to the study.
Other Florida cities on U-Haul’s mover list include: No. 1. Kissimmee-St. Cloud, No. 3. Palm Bay-Melbourne, No. 4. North Port, No. 6. Fort Myers-North Fort Myers, No. 9. Clermont, No. 11. Daytona Beach, No. 13. Port St. Lucie and No. 19. Brandon-Riverview. St. Petersburg got an honorable mention.
Growth cities are calculated by the net gain of one-way U-Haul trucks entering a city versus leaving that city in a calendar year. Migration trends data is compiled from well over 2 million one-way U-Haul truck customer transactions that occur annually. Neighboring cities in U-Haul markets are often packaged together for migration trends purposes.
To view the top 50 growth states and the top 25 Canadian growth cities visit myuhaulstory.com.
