At its core, the housing market is a story of where and why people move from place to place — and now that picture is coming into clearer focus.
New population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau reveal the parts of the country that people continued to move out of last year, and where inbound migration didn’t fully offset these losses. They also confirm the markets which continued to benefit from an influx of new potential homebuyers.
The data — which covers a year-long period ending July 1, 2025 — sheds light on a crucial time for a real estate industry that continued to fracture along regional lines when it came to housing inventory and sales, and on the uneven consequences of trade policy and immigration enforcement that occurred last year.
Explore this data down to the county level with Intel’s interactive maps.
Ins and outs
In the first half of 2025, the housing market’s growth was deeply uneven.
The success or struggles of local markets reflected their unique inventory situations, general home-price levels, and industries reliant on international trade.
But local markets were also affected differently by the flow of people into and out of population centers. And for the first time, we know what that looked like and how it was changing.
Take the map below. It shows the counties most affected by U.S. residents who moved across county or state lines — prime candidates to make a home purchase at the time of the move or in the near future.
Places shaded in blue saw more inbound domestic migration than outbound movers during this period. Red-shaded areas saw more people leave for other counties than moved in to replace them.
We see people moving out of places like California, the High Plains, the southern stretch of the Mississippi River, and some select metro areas like Miami.
Markets benefiting from inbound domestic migration through July of last year tended to be in the Pacific Northwest, the non-coastal Western population centers, the big-city suburbs of Texas, the Carolinas alongside Georgia and Tennessee, central Florida, New England and parts of the Midwest.
For many of these places, the general population trend isn’t new.
But what was new — particularly in the first half of last year — was the extent to which markets that had once depended on international immigration experienced a sudden shock to the system.
The map below shows how the net international immigration rate of every county in the year ending mid-2025 compared to the year before.
In almost every county in the country, immigration rates declined or were stagnant. And some places saw a particularly pronounced effect.
These immigration trends coincided with stricter border enforcement during the final months of the Biden administration, and newly aggressive detention and deportation policies during the first months of the Trump administration.
To be clear, the map above shows how rates changed from 2024 to 2025, not what net immigration inflows and outflows looked like at one point in time.
In many markets, there is still net-positive immigration. This has been delaying or offsetting population decline in many cities — but that may not remain true for long.
On the other side of the spectrum, America’s fastest-growing counties are generally benefiting from domestic movers and international immigration influxes.
To be sure, the housing market is subject to a host of factors other than just population movement, but this is one crucial part of the picture. Intel will continue to track how these various factors are playing out at the local level.
