Residential Migration and the COVID-19 Crisis: Towards an Urban Exodus in France?

Abstract

– Much has been written about the potential effect of the COVID-19 crisis on residential mobility. To explore its effects in France, we reconstruct flows of mobility intentions based on owner and buyer estimates on the platform MeilleursAgents from January 2019 to September 2021, and we analyze, using logit and nested logit models, how the pandemic has changed the probability that individuals from both urban and rural intend to relocate. Our results show that, after a time of shock during the first lockdown in spring 2020, the desire to migrate, either to rural municipalities or to other catchment areas, increased as the pandemic and the restrictive measures continued, and was particularly pronounced after the end of the third and last lockdown. © 2022, Institut National de la Statistique et des Etudes Economiques. All rights reserved.