Post-Pandemic Migration Shifts Franchise Prospect Interest Northward and and Eastward
By: Michael Alston for Franchise Insights
April 13, 2023 – By comparing the shares by state year-over-year by quarter, from January-March 2020 to January-March 2022, there was a shift in the mix of where aspiring franchisees were expecting to locate franchises – from south to north, and west to east, according to new data from FranchiseInsights.com. Increasing state share in that period is shown in green, and decreasing share is in red in the scaled map above.
Note that the state locations shown are where the prospect was searching to buy franchises, which in most cases is the prospect’s current state of residency.
This is almost a mirror image of the shifts in franchise interest from 2020 to 2022 that we showed in an article last April.
Florida and Louisiana had the largest absolute changes in percentage share of franchise prospects among all 50 states over the last year. Among the states with the largest increases in share, Mid-Atlantic states and Florida were the largest gainers, along with Wisconsin, Illinois and Utah.
The chart below shows the percentage change for the states with the largest 2023 overall franchise interest, where among the top three, only Florida showed growth.
The overall trends in location of interest support the theory that having experienced remote work and more flexible working conditions brought about by the pandemic, workers moved to warmer and less-populous states. But in the most recent twelve months ending March 2023, those trends reversed, with some of the largest growers in the prior period now showing a lower share of interest.
In a future article, we will look more closely at the multi-year migration to see whether other trends emerge.
In this analysis we did not look at in-state migration – from larger to smaller cities with more affordable homes and less traffic, for example – which may explain the increase in New York share, rather than net migration into the state.
This proprietary data is drawn from the FranchiseVentures lead generation platform of franchise-investment inquiries in the United States.
Franchise Ventures is the leading franchise lead-generation platform for potential franchisees to thousands of growing franchise systems in the United States and Canada. Its franchise lead generation brands include Franchise.com, Franchise Solutions, Franchise Gator, Franchise Opportunities, Franchise For Sale, SmallBusinessStartup.com and BusinessBroker.net, and together they provide the largest aggregation of prospective franchise buyers in the U.S.
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Published on Wednesday, April 12th, 2023.