It is no secret that people are flocking to Denver, CO–but where are they call coming from?

The Denver metro population grew more than ten percent from 2010 to 2015, reaching a population of more than 2.8 million people.

That got us at SpareFoot curious to find out where all these people are moving from, so we looked further back at some other Census data from 2009-2013 that shows the different places people moved to the Denver metro area from.

Moving to Denver

Specifically, we looked at data for county to county migration to Denver County.

It turns out that 64 percent of people moving to Denver County are moving from another county in Colorado.

The remaining 36 percent came from somewhere out of state:

Here are the top places where people are moving to the Denver-area from:

Los Angeles County, CA Cook County, IL (Chicago) Dallas County, TX Maricopa County, AZ (Phoenix) San Diego County, CA Orange County, CA Suffolk County, MA (Boston) El Paso County, TX Clark County, NV Multnomah County, OR

More than 23,750 people moved to Denver County from out-of-state from 2009 to 2013. Meanwhile 42,674 moved from another county in Colorado.

All that movement generates demand for local self-storage facilities.

Moving Trends

We took a look at our own data to see if current relocation trends correspond with what the Census recorded previously.

To compile our list, we looked at the number of searches for storage in the Denver metro area from April 2015 through March 2016. We also looked at where those searches originated from.

Based on our analysis, Chicago is the top city where people are likely to be moving to Denver from, followed by Dallas and Los Angeles. Those cities make up the top three origin cities identified by the Census, which suggests that migration from those cities to Denver is a continuing trend.

Below are the top ten cities:

Top 10 MSA’s by number of searches for storage in Denver / Percent share of top 10

Chicago-Gary-Kenosha IL-IN-WI CMSA 15% Dallas-Fort Worth TX CMSA 14% Los Angeles-Riverside-Orange County CA 12% San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose CA CMSA 11% New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island 10% Fort Collins-Loveland CO MSA 9% Washington-Baltimore DC-MD-VA-WV CMSA 8% Colorado Springs CO MSA 8% Houston-Galveston-Brazoria TX CMSA 8% Phoenix-Mesa AZ MSA 6%

We believe that storage searches made from one city for storage space in another city likely indicates intent to relocate to that city. As you can see, the top three metros for storage searchers aligns closely with the top three county-to-county movers recorded by the Census. This suggests that historical moving trends to Denver continue presently.

Embed this image on your site (copy the code below):