“It’s something we like to call the Mass Techxodus.”
That’s what Meghan Maloof Berdellans, who runs the executive relocation firm S&S Global, wrote on her blog about all the tech execs leaving San Francisco or New York every week for a new home: Miami. After Covid-19 made remote work ubiquitous, tech workers have been fleeing pricey Silicon Valley for places like Austin and, yes, Miami. “As tech leaders have decamped from San Francisco and Wall Street titans from New York, many have spread across the country to locations with sun, lower taxes, and — preferably — more relaxed lockdowns,” reports Nellie Bowles in the New York Times.
There are so many new people flooding in, notes Bowles, that the median home sale price in Palm Beach rose to $4.9 million by the end of 2020, up 29% over 2019 (compared to a 5% increase for condos and co-ops in Manhattan). Alex Merutka, the founder of Craftsman+, a marketing automation company, recently moved from San Francisco to Miami with some of his friends in tech and finance, who all live on the same street. “You have this thing where everyone’s moving to Miami at the same time, and it’s like we’re all college freshmen again,” he told Bowles. “Everyone who moved down here, they didn’t want to be alone — no one wants to quarantine alone. This let us press the reset button on how we wanted to live.”
