Where Tampa's Buyers Really Come From

Update (Feb 14, 2026): Our algorithm flagged real-time migration signals from NYC and New Hampshire accelerating into Tampa. Read the latest analysis.

The housing market finally looks ready to tilt back in favor of buyers. The past six years have been unprecedented by almost any measure. During the pandemic, a near-zero interest-rate environment unleashed a surge in demand, fueling bidding wars and driving home prices to historic highs. Then inflation hit. The Federal Reserve responded with aggressive rate hikes, crushing affordability and sidelining many would-be buyers, especially first-time homeowners.

Now, the balance is starting to shift. In 2025, roughly 62% of buyers purchased homes below the original listing price, the highest share since 2019. An early but meaningful signal that buyer leverage is returning. The change is most visible across the Sun Belt: markets in Florida are seeing higher inventory levels, longer days on market, and more frequent price concessions.

In conversations with agents, brokers, investors, buyers, and sellers, one theme keeps surfacing: knowing where buyers are coming from matters more than ever. The migration corridors between origin and destination markets will be the competitive edge over the next several years.

Where Tampa's Buyers Really Come From

Over 125,000 households move to Florida each year. That's billions in potential transactions.

We've been studying migration trends, and many top out-of-state origins are not what you'd expect.

What if there was a way to see where your buyers were coming from in real-time? A way to proactively position yourself ahead of trends and move ahead of the pack?

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Breaking Past the Obvious

Everyone knows the narrative about New Yorkers fleeing to Florida or maybe people from California seeking tax savings. These aren't secrets and they do have merit, but there's more to the story.

After research, trial and error, and a few more late nights than we'd like to admit, we've developed an approach to identify migration signals in real-time.

Let us tell you a little more.

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What is a corridor?

A corridor is a specific origin-to-destination migration path, such as Louisville → Tampa or Syracuse → Tampa. Corridors are particularly meaningful because they represent not just the relocation of an individual or family, but a significant economic transaction involving multiple parties. For most American families, home equity is the single most valuable asset in their portfolio.

Nearly 8 million Americans move across state lines each year, and these out-of-state corridors are especially compelling because they tend to share characteristics that make them disproportionately valuable:

• They represent clear, measurable migration flows
• Movers often relocate for major life or economic reasons: jobs, family proximity, retirement, and affordability, which tend to increase transaction complexity and agent involvement.
• Interstate relocations involve substantial transactions — movers typically are engaging in larger life decisions, making understanding these flows valuable for market strategy.
• Income and demographic patterns differ by corridor — some states draw higher-income households, others draw different cohorts, which can influence pricing, buyer behavior, and agent strategy.

The Algorithm

We built a multi-factor algorithm to rank which corridors show the strongest migration intent right now—not where people moved last year. Some of the factors we looked at include:

• Social connectivity patterns — Based on peer-reviewed research showing network ties predict migration outcomes
• Thousands of search signals — Aggregated intent data at the corridor level
• Economic indicators — Employment trends, housing dynamics, income patterns
• Tax advantage scoring — Quantified savings from state income tax differentials
• Migration momentum — Is the corridor accelerating or cooling?

We're not going to reveal the exact weighting (that's our secret sauce). But here are the top 5 out-of-state corridors showing the strongest signals into Tampa right now:

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What's Heating Up Right Now

Migration patterns shift as economics, housing markets, and social networks evolve. Using recent behavioral and search data, our platform highlights corridors showing unusual momentum over the past 90 days:

Louisville, KY → Tampa: Our algorithm currently ranks Louisville as a top out-of-state corridor into Tampa, driven by elevated housing search activity and clear tax arbitrage: relocators can capture roughly a 4% income tax savings by moving to Florida. Economic softness in Kentucky's bourbon industry appears to be coinciding with increased outbound interest, strengthening the signal.

Syracuse, NY → Tampa: Upstate New York has bled population for years, but here's what our algorithm caught: Syracuse movers cluster toward Tampa. The social connectivity signal (existing ties to the Tampa area) is unusually strong for a Northern market. This is not a new corridor, but it is accelerating faster than many headline metros.

Manchester, NH → Tampa: Manchester sits at the center of one of the nation's tightest housing markets. Our algorithm flags this corridor for "qualified intent": higher-income households actively comparing costs and running relocation math. While New Hampshire has no income tax, high property taxes compress affordability. Tampa offers a compelling alternative at roughly half the median home price.

These aren't predictions, they're real-time signals of elevated intent. This is migration intelligence, and it gives anyone the chance to act before trends show up in the headlines.

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Why We Built This

We're two founders at the University of Virginia who got obsessed with a simple question: What if you could predict migration before it happens?

The standard approach is backward-looking. IRS migration data shows where people moved, but it's 2+ years stale by the time you see it. The most recent release covers tax year 2021-2022. That's like driving using only the rearview mirror.

Outside of that, the alternatives are limited: subjective market reports, anecdotes, or reactive analyses built from a company's internal data. These are almost always backward-looking and late.

We had the vision to use forward-looking intelligence, analyzing real-time signals that tell agents where buyers are moving, not where they already went.

So we built it.

The result: corridor-level nowcasting. A data-driven approach to identify signals that lead traditional data sources by 12+ months.

We're not claiming to predict the future. We're claiming to see the present more clearly than anyone else.

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What This Means for Agents

If you're a Tampa agent or broker, here's the playbook:

Capture first-mover advantage. We've ranked corridors across the Carolinas, Texas, and the Northeast that are showing elevated intent signals for moves into Florida. Agents who position themselves early in rising corridors capture outsized value before the broader market knows where to look.

Build referral networks where momentum is building. Our corridor rankings update as signals shift. Our agent-matching feature connects you directly with partners who serve your exact origin markets and buyer profiles, helping you build referral relationships where activity is actually increasing.

Turn corridors into content. Need a YouTube script tailored to Louisville buyers? A TikTok explaining why Syracuse families cluster toward Tampa? Talking points for a newsletter, targeted Facebook ad copy, or a blog post on tax savings? Each corridor comes with the real data to support it. The goal is simple: give you real substance, grounded in live signals, recent news, and demographic insights, so your content delivers value instead of noise.

Think corridors, not cities, and niche down. "Migration from the Northeast" is too broad to act on. Louisville-to-Tampa has different dynamics than Syracuse-to-Tampa. The agents who win are the ones who become the expert in a specific corridor. A quote from one of our favorite authors, Napoleon Hill: "The jack-of-all-trades seldom is good at any. Concentrate all of your efforts on one definite chief aim."

We built CorridorIQ to give you this edge right now. Anyone can explore the live corridor map completely free.

Our mission is to provide real-time signals into where people are moving and why, so professionals can make better connections and help people find the right place to call home. As the world becomes more digital, we use the frontier of technology, data, and artificial intelligence to lean into what matters most: trust and human-to-human interaction.

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Questions about the methodology or want to discuss Tampa market dynamics? Reach out to zgreene@corridor-iq.com or landerson@corridor-iq.com.