Editor’s Note: Each Friday, WRAL TechWire takes a deep dive into the Triangle’s real estate markets.  That includes stories on what’s happening in the Triangle’s residential market and the commercial real estate market. 

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RALEIGH – There are already signs that the Triangle real estate market is heating up for a strong spring and strong 2023, with price appreciation expected.

That’s according to a new report from the National Association of REALTORS, and its author, a senior economist and director of forecasting, Nadia Evangelou.

Here’s what’s happening, in a sentence: More people are deciding to move to North Carolina and to the Triangle than who are deciding to move away.

Buying a home in the Triangle is more affordable than it’s been in months

Why are people moving to the Triangle?

“Raleigh is more affordable compared to other areas, and people continue to move,” said Evangelou in an interview with WRAL TechWire on Thursday.

And people are moving for a variety of reasons, including to take new jobs as the region continues to add high-wage job opportunities across multiple industries.  But they’re also moving to retire in the region, or to bring their remote job with them from an area with a higher cost of living.

On the whole, said Evangelou, when people move, they’re considering new locations, often out of the metropolitan area in which they already reside.

And more people were looking to move to a new metropolitan area than ever before last quarter, a Redfin analysis of user data showed.  According to the study, nearly one in every four Redfin users looking for homes – 24.6% – were searching in metropolitan areas where they did not reside.

In 2021 and 2022, the most popular states and metropolitan areas in terms of net migration were in the southeast, according to a new study authored by Evangelou for the National Association of REALTORS.

That includes North Carolina, which ranked as the state with the third highest rate of in-bound to out-bound movers in the nation.

In total, there were nearly 100,000 more people who moved to North Carolina in 2022 than who left the state, among the “largest influx of people in 2021 and in 2022,” according to Evangelou.

 

People are moving most to these Raleigh zip codes

Both the Raleigh metropolitan area and Durham-Chapel Hill metropolitan area were among the regions of the country that are gaining the most number of people.

In the Raleigh metropolitan statistical area, for every 100 people who chose to move, 54 of them moved into the region while 46 moved away.  That’s among the highest ratios of inbound movers in the country, though the Charlotte region outpaced the Triangle area, with 57% of all movers coming into the region, which includes parts of South Carolina.

And in Durham-Chapel Hill’s metropolitan statistical area, which includes Chatham County, where VinFast and Wolfspeed are planning to build massive manufacturing plants that will hire thousands of people, 53 of every 100 movers are moving into the region while 47 are moving away.

In fact, in the Raleigh metropolitan statistical area, the most popular zip codes, measured by the share of inbound movers, includes 27568, 27636, 27658, 27627, 27624, 27562, and 27611, all of which have more than two of every three movers coming from out of the metropolitan statistical area, according to the data set from the National Association of REALTORS.

Triangle home prices climb even as sales fall to lowest level since 2019

Triangle remains resilient

Further, the Triangle is among the most resilient regions in the United States when it comes to towns that experienced a booming housing market during the first two years of the pandemic.

That’s why 2023 is forecasted to be another year of housing demand outstripping the supply of homes for sale, according to a recent LendingTree rankings report that put the Triangle metro market as two of the top 10 boomtowns.

After all, the Triangle's local economy is strong, job growth continues to occur and is projected, particularly among high-wage occupations like technology, advanced manufacturing, and life sciences.  And those who are already living here as homeowners may choose to remain in their existing homes as many locked in low fixed rate mortgages during the prior ten years when rates were historically low.

Which means that prices, on average, are expected to continue to rise, albeit not at the same price appreciation rate experienced in 2021 and the first half of 2022.

“We expect strong market activity,” said Evangelou.  “Home sale prices continue to rise.”

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WRAL TechWire reporter Jason Parker is also a licensed North Carolina real estate agent and works with journalists from WRAL.com to track and present market data and report on how people are experiencing the region's changing real estate markets.  These special reports will use the category tag "Triangle Real Estate" or "Triangle Real Estate Market.