Did people relocate to Myrtle Beach during the pandemic? Here’s what the data shows.
The number of people who decided to move to the Myrtle Beach area temporarily was down 80% this year, and the coronavirus pandemic is to blame.
This may include people who move to their beach house for the summer, or those who come for jobs during tourism season.
According to data obtained from the United States Postal Service, requests to temporarily change one’s address to Myrtle Beach, North Myrtle Beach and Surfside Beach were down significantly during the height of the pandemic compared with the same time period in 2019. While there were nearly 800 requests between mid-March and the end of June 2019, only a mere 165 such requests were filed during that same period in 2020.
A temporary change-of-address is used for any move where the person expects to return to their old address within less than six months, according to the USPS.
The numbers each year may be slightly higher in reality; the USPS doesn’t disclose when fewer than 10 requests were filed in order to protect the privacy of residents.
“The purpose of this policy was to minimize the ability of a recipient of the data to identify where any specific individual or individuals may have moved from or to, which would be a violation of our responsibility to safeguard the privacy of the information about customers submitting change-of-address orders,” Michelle Evans of the USPS said in an email.
Even with that in mind, the volume of temporary change-of-address requests in the area dropped by nearly 80% as the pandemic ravaged the country’s economy.
The Hilton Head Island area saw a reverse effect — the area saw a spike in requests during the first phase of the pandemic, even as coronavirus cases spiked in South Carolina in June.
In the long term, the Myrtle Beach area could see fewer out-of-towners moving to the area, but more local relocation, according to a report from apartmentlist.com, a website that connects renters with properties and conducts market research.
The website’s report analyzed more than 8 million searches and 150 metro areas in the country, which can indicate trends about where people are looking to move, according to Research Associate Rob Warnock. The report compared year-over-year figures in April through August to gauge the impact of the coronavirus pandemic.
“Everything is kind of contextualized against the backdrop of the coronavirus,” Warnock said.
Fewer here looking to move elsewhere
The Myrtle Beach area — which the report considers Horry County and Brunswick County, NC — saw a considerable drop in residents searching for housing in different areas. In 2019, around half of the searches in the area were looking to move to another region, but so far in 2020, that number has hovered around 40%, according to the report.
Where areas generally see more of a give-and-take relationship between renters moving into and out of the area, the impacts of the pandemic seemingly halted that trend. More people are looking to move to save money instead of upgrading their home, Warnock said.
“You don’t really have people moving both directions,” he said. “You have people saying, ‘I need to take this opportunity to save money, not spend it.’”
It’s not uncommon for mid-sized metros like Myrtle Beach to see a drop in out-of-area searches this year, Warnock said. But of the 150 areas analyzed, Myrtle Beach saw the 12th highest decrease. This could be because people are looking to downsize without taking on the extra costs of relocating, specifically because places with a strong tourism economy were hit especially hard financially, Warnock said.
“These are the places where unemployment has definitely hit hard,” Warnock said. “By far the biggest driver for people’s decision to move right now is their newfound financial situation.”