Over the past year, professionals have fled high-cost cities and turned to secondary cities and the suburbs for a chance to breathe.
Referred to as “Zoomtowns,” these markets provide newly remote workers with the ability to settle into their new arrangements, often finding larger homes with room for an office for the same price as a studio apartment in New York City.
Prior to the pandemic, Austin was already making a name for itself as a new hub for the technology world. Now, this area has solidified itself as the top relocation destination over the last 18 months, according to LinkedIn’s July Workforce Report.
Along with workers migrating to the area, companies have also relocated, especially as they shift to hybrid working.
For instance, Contentstack moved to Austin’s Silicon Hills from San Francisco in 2019. While they access talent all over the country with their hybrid model, CEO Neha Sampat finds that using Austin as a hub for in-person meetups has been ideal and could even attract some of their remote staff to the area.
“The beauty of the hybrid model is that we can source talent from anywhere they live and still use a hub like Austin as a regular gathering place for meetings, events and team offsites,” said Sampat.