The Queen City is growing at a rapid clip.

The metro area grew 2 percent between 2014 and 2015, according to the most recent census data, bringing the total population to 2.4 million people.

That growth should be apparent to current residents as they bear witness to an increasing number of apartment complexes, and even self-storage facilities.

That got us at SpareFoot wondering, where are all these people moving from?

To find out, we looked at some additional Census data from 2009-2013 that shows county to county migration patterns across the United States.

Moving to Charlotte

Looking at inbound migration to Mecklenburg County, where Charlotte is located, we found that 60,747 people moved to the county during a five year period. The majority of arrivals came from out of state–more than 62 percent. The other 37 percent moved from another county in North Carolina, mostly from neighboring Union and Gaston counties.

As for the out-of-state movers, these are the most common counties of origin:

York County, SC Cook County, IL (Chicago) Richland County, SC (Columbia) Hudson County, NJ (Jersey City) Suffolk County, NY (Long Island) Maricopa County, AZ (Phoenix) Broward County, FL (Fort Lauderdale) Bronx County, NY (New York City) Fulton County, GA (Atlanta) Alexandria City, VA

Current Trends

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

SpareFoot looked at our own data to see where people are moving to Charlotte from currently.

To compile our list, we looked at the number of Sparefoot.com searchers for storage in the Charlotte metro area from April 2015 through April 2016. We also found the top ten places those searches originated from.

Based on our data, Atlanta is the top market where people are moving from. The area generated more than 20% of searches for storage among the top ten places, followed closely by the New York metro area.

Below are the top ten metro areas where people are searching for storage in Charlotte, along with the percent share of searchers among the top 10:

Atlanta GA 20.8% New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island 20.5% Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill NC 13.1% Greensboro–Winston-Salem–High Point NC 12.9% Washington-Baltimore DC-MD-VA-WV 12.4% Chicago-Gary-Kenosha IL-IN-WI 4.5% Philadelphia-Wilmington-Atlantic City PA-NJ-DE-MD 4.4% Miami-Fort Lauderdale FL 4.1% Greenville-Spartanburg-Anderson SC 3.8% Fayetteville NC 3.5%

We believe that storage searches made from one city for storage space in another city likely indicates intent to relocate to that city.