Do Americans love your city?
Although there are much more accurate economic indicators to analyze in real estate, desirability is important to the overall health of a city’s real estate sector. If people are flooding out of your area, there’s a chance that real estate is or will be hurting whereas if people flood in, the opposite is true.
Is your city diverse or is it reliant upon singular industries? Are people transferring in for work or for the geography? Are people transferring out because of overcrowding or price of living? What is causing relocations in and out of your city?
Moving in and out:
The red lines indicate people relocating out of the city and the black lines indicate people relocating into the city. Below are three cities, two of which have heavy red lines (people leaving) while one has heavy black lines (people coming). Click any image below to enlarge.
The interactive mapping tool from Forbes not only makes for great blog fodder for real estate blogs, it is a great chance to explain to your blog readers what makes your city great!
Lani is the COO and News Director at The American Genius, has co-authored a book, co-founded BASHH, Austin Digital Jobs, Remote Digital Jobs, and is a seasoned business writer and editorialist with a penchant for the irreverent.

Eric Hempler
June 16, 2010 at 5:51 pm
I thought this was pretty interesting. In fact I made a blog post on it…nothing fancy.
Joe Loomer
June 16, 2010 at 6:21 pm
Where do you find all these wonderful toys!?!?
Thanks Lani! Some link-love coming your way!
Navy Chief, Navy Pride
Jay Papasan
June 16, 2010 at 10:33 pm
This is excellent. Thanks for sharing!
Joe
June 16, 2010 at 11:57 pm
Wow! How cool is that. We seem to have more dark lines than red lines. Nice!
Shea Bunch
June 17, 2010 at 12:12 am
Very interesting tool. LA should be empty pretty soon.
Miami Condo Shop
June 17, 2010 at 8:58 am
Very interesting, the interactive mapping tool from Forbes looks pretty handy for real estate blogs. It’s simple yet highly informative.
Fresno Real Estate
June 17, 2010 at 2:07 pm
I guess it’s true that Austin, Texas is the place to live.
Karen Goodman
June 18, 2010 at 1:35 am
I had no intention of writing another blog post tonight until I saw this map. My post will go up in the morning with a link coming your way!
In addition to give us something to write about on our blogs, it might also be a good tool to help realtors target some posts specifically for the cities that are sending the most inbound people. For example, there are a lot more red lines than black lines on the 3 counties that make up the St. Louis region. But, there are a bunch of black lines coming from the San Diego area and from Michigan. Knowing this, it would make sense to use these cities as my example if I was going to write a post showing a cost of living comparison calculator or using a fictional couple as an example.
Josh
August 10, 2010 at 11:07 pm
This is very fascinating. For someone interested in Chicago real estate, it is interesting to know most people moving here come from the east coast and when leaving the city they go west. Thank you for this information!