If you’re eyeballing a move, there’s about a 48% chance that you’re looking for a move outside of Manchester. But this percentage is actually one of the lowest of all UK cities. Only Londoners are less likely to leave town when they move.
Research from online removal platform Getamover shows that – on average – 66% of people wanting to move are looking for a new home outside of the city they currently live in.
The data shows that Mancunians are some of the least likely UK citizens to move outside of their city. And when they decide to look for a home elsewhere, the following map shows the interesting locations according to the data of the removal platform.
Some city-dwellers from the UK show a much stronger desire to leave their town. The study found a number of cities that had a much higher percentage of people that wanted to make an out-of-town move:
- Wolverhampton: 76%
- Cardiff: 80%
- Bristol: 85%
- Edinburgh: 86%
- Leeds: 87%
- Plymouth: 92%
This is in sharp contrast with a small study performed by the London Assembly Housing Committee in August 2020. This study found that 46 per cent of Londoners who want to move want the home to be out of London.
This study was reportedly a sign for an upcoming exodus of London residents, signaling a potential drop in population for the first time in more than 30 years. Fears of a mass exodus of people from London were further fuelled when a report from the Economic Statistics Centre for Excellence estimated that around 700,000 foreign-born residents had moved out of London between the third quarters of 2019 and 2020.
While this news is not specific to Manchester, the new data shows that Mancunians are a lot similar to Londoners. When looking at moving, less than half of both Londoners and Mancunians are looking to move out of town.
Allison Willis, Data Analyst at Getamover, commented:
“When the London data was first released by the Assembly, it was considered to be a sign of a potential upcoming exodus. However, the findings were only based on 450 survey responses, and we wanted to see how this correlated to other UK cities.”
She continues: “As we present in our findings, we were surprised to see that Londoners are some of the least likely citizens to actually leave town. People from other cities – such as Edinburgh or Plymouth – are much more likely to move elsewhere.”
“While COVID-19 has drastically impacted the way we live, we didn’t see a big change in the number of people wanting to move out of the cities. Salaries in the big cities (and London especially) are higher when compared to the rest of the UK. And even though housing prices continue to trend upwards, it can be argued that the cost of living vs salary still benefits the city life. This can explain why people are less likely to move away from the big cities, where job markets are the most active.”
The study also looked at average moving distances per city and found Manchester citizens move 78 miles on average. This is close to the national average of 81 miles. The biggest outliers in this category were Plymouth (136 miles), Edinburgh (117 miles) and Hull (96 miles).
The average number of rooms moved by Mancunians was found to be 2.81, slightly below the national average of 2.90. The study found that Londoners move the smallest houses, which makes sense since London is by far the most populated city in the UK. With the most expensive real estate market, it makes sense that Londoners get less room for their buck.
