Are Chicago apartment dwellers ready to move out of state? Not all of them, certainly. But a new report from Apartment List suggests that a good chunk of renters are interested in moving to other Midwest cities.
This is one of the key insights from Apartment List’s newest Renter Migration Report published earlier this week.
The report analyzes data on millions of Apartment List searches to see where the site’s users are looking to move. The company’s latest report looks at the seach preferences of users who registered with Apartment List between Jan. 1 and Dec. 31 of last year.
Apartment List found that during the pandemic years a growing number of its users’ searches indicated that they were looking to move from the country’s largest and most expensive markets to more affordable and less densely populated parts of the country.
The company’s most recent numbers, though, show that renters are beginning to slow their searches for locations in new cities or states. As Apartment List said, more renters in 2023 were looking to stay put in the regions in which they currently live. Fewer were looking to make long-distance moves.
But what did Apartment List have to say about Chicago? The company said in 2023, 31% of the site’s users in the Chicago metropolitan area were searching for apartments in a different metro. The most popular search destinations last year for Chicago-area users were Milwaukee, Indianapolis and St. Louis.
This doesn’t mean that renters aren’t interested in Chicago. Apartment List found that 21% of renters looking for apartment listings in Chicago last year were searching from an out-of-town location. The most common of these areas were Milwaukee, New York City and Minneapolis.
