Franchise Interest Rebounds in Coastal, Border and Mid-Atlantic States
By: Michael Alston for Franchise Insights
April 30, 2025 – In a year-over-year analysis of franchise lead generation, interest in franchises shifted to a number of border and coastal states, particularly California, New Jersey and Michigan according to new data from FranchiseInsights.com. By comparing quarterly shares by state for the first quarter of 2024 to the first quarter of 2025, we see a shift in the mix of states where aspiring franchisees were expecting to locate franchises – to the north and west. In the color-scaled map above, highest increases in state share of interest in that period are shown in green, and decreasing shares are shown scaled to red, ranging in values from under one percent in either direction (0.52% loss in Alabama to 0.7% growth in California).
That California showed the highest growth in interest is particularly noteworthy given the suppression in franchise inquiries seen as fires ravaged the Palisades area for three weeks in January 2025.
This is almost a mirror image of the pandemic shifts in franchise interest from 2020 to 2022, and somewhat of a reversal of the northward and eastward trends spotted in an April 2023 article. In the first quarter of 2024, California and Florida had the highest share losses among the top ten states for franchise inquiries.
Note that the state locations shown are where prospects were searching to buy franchises, which in most cases is the prospect’s current state of residency.
California, gaining 0.7%, and Alabama, losing 0.52% had the two largest absolute changes in percentage share of franchise prospects among all 50 states over the recent 12-4 month span. Among the states with the ten largest increases in share, joining CA, NJ and MI were a mix of central states (CO and TX) along with coastal states MD, OR, VA, DE, WA and the island of Hawaii. Note that all the remaining states changed very little – less than plus or minus 0.9% in share of total inquiries.
The chart below shows the percentage change for the states ranked highest by Q1 2025 overall franchise interest, where only three of the top ten – CA, TX and NJ – showed growth over the prior year. Georgia and Illinois logged the largest losses in absolute percentages, though both were under 0.3% in losses.
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.
This proprietary data is drawn from the Franchise Ventures 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 Tuesday, April 22nd, 2025.