Residential migration and the Covid-19 crisis: towards an urban exodus in France?

Expert

The July 2021^[1] Toluna survey for Meilleurs Agents^[2] reveals that among those who have changed their primary residence since July 2020 or who were planning to do so before January 2022, half have changed their search criteria to have a garden (39%), to be closer to nature (34%) or to live in a smaller city (19%).

Nevertheless, these desires are not new. As evidence, D'Alessandro et al. (2021), explain that the average annual population growth between 2007 and 2017 was 0.66% in rural areas but only 0.38% in urban areas. Similarly, in 2019, an IFOP survey^[3] showed that 57% of people living in urban areas wanted to leave them. Three main obstacles prevented them from taking the plunge, including the lack of services (for 60%), the lack of transportation infrastructure (for 53%) and the difficulties of access to employment (for 46%).

This last barrier could be removed for the portion of the population that can telework. Indeed, this practice has accelerated with the crisis. In the Toluna survey3 , Best Agents indicates that about 50% of workers plan to continue teleworking after the pandemic. However, 60% want to work remotely no more than two days a week and only 19% want to work remotely full-time.

To know if we are facing an urban exodus in France, it is necessary to trace mobility flows. However, detailed and representative data from INSEE that would make it possible to analyze whether the determinants of residential mobility have changed since the Covid-19 crisis are not yet available^[4]. Thus, the originality of our study lies in part in the data used to determine mobility intentions in near-real time during the different phases of the epidemic. Our work is part of the research program "L'exode urbain? Small flows, big effects", operated by PUCA/POPSU^[5], during which our team had also analyzed the actual mobilities thanks to the mail forwarding contracts with La Poste.

To analyze the modification of French residential mobility intentions with the crisis, we mobilized data describing the behavior of users of the Meilleurs Agents platform. This platform is known for its online real estate estimation tool and attracts 2.4 million unique visitors per month. In the academic literature, the use of such high-frequency data is recent and promising, as it allows us to observe the behavior of users by following each step of their home buying project.

Meilleurs Agents' estimation tool is an online form in which the user enters the characteristics of the property, including the address, in order to obtain an estimate of its price. We also ask the user if he/she values the property because he/she owns it, if so for what purpose (is it his/her main residence?), or because it is a property he/she wishes to buy. It should be noted that to obtain the result, the user must be connected. This allows us, thanks to an anonymized identifier, to follow his activity on the platform.

Thus, by keeping among all the estimates made as a buyer between January 1, 2019 and September 20, 2021, the users who declared to us that they owned a primary residence via a prior online estimate, we were able to reconstruct more than 100,000 mobility intention flows for more than 80,000 different users.

Through an econometric analysis of this data we obtain two main results. First, among our users searching from an urban area, the probability of searching outside the catchment area of their city of residence is 13% higher since the crisis. For rural residents, this probability increases by 10.8%. Our second result concerns the probability of searching in a rural area from an urban area, which increases by 7.7% since the crisis. In contrast, there is no significant increase for rural residents. When we cross the two dimensions, we see that the probability of searching in a rural area in another catchment area rather than searching in an urban area in the catchment area of one's place of residence is higher since the crisis (+13.9% for urban residents and +18.7% for rural residents). Thus, our urban users are looking significantly farther away and more in rural areas since the crisis.

Moreover, the residential real estate market does not seem to have been immune to the crisis. At Meilleurs Agents, we note a reversal in price trends. Before the crisis, price increases in France were mainly in Paris and the 10 largest French cities (+21% and +22% between March 2017 and March 2020), while prices increased less in rural areas (+4.6%). On the contrary, between March 2020 and February 2023, prices increased by 21.5% in rural areas, decreased by 2.5% in Paris, and increased by only 17.4% in the 10 largest French cities (an average that is led by Marseille with a +33% increase).

Understanding all of these changes now represents a major challenge in terms of public policy, particularly for territories that have become attractive and that must anticipate future infrastructure needs. The stakes are also expressed in terms of private choices, whether for institutional investors or for households building up their assets.

 

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Release date: April 2023