Kerry Smith’s reason for moving from Long Island to Wilmington several years ago is a familiar one. “My parents retired down here, so they found it first,” said Smith, a podiatrist opening a new practice in Wilmington in February. “We’d come down to visit them and fell in love with the area.”

Smith and her parents are definitely not alone, a fact supported by national real estate and moving company statistics, as well as anecdotal evidence seen by local real estate professionals.

In recent months, the number of Northeast residents buying or looking for homes in Wilmington seems to have increased, Realtors say, with some retirees in those states, who might have been on the fence about selling their houses in a struggling economy, deciding to take advantage of improving sales and prices.

December existing-home sales in the country’s Northeastern states declined 2.9 percent to an annual rate of 660,000, but were 3.1 percent higher than a year ago, according to National Association of Realtors data released Jan. 23. The median price in the Northeast was $246,600, 3.2 percent above a year ago, the NAR’s report said.

Single-family home sales increased 3.5 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.47 million in December from 4.32 million in November, according to the NAR. Overall for 2014, home sales in the U.S. declined 3.1 percent from the 2013 total of a little more than 5 million.

This month, national moving company United Van Lines announced that the Northeast “is experiencing a moving deficit with New Jersey (65 percent outbound), New York (64 percent) and Connecticut (57 percent) making the list of top outbound states for the third consecutive year,” according to the firm’s 38th annual National Movers Study.  

The study also showed that North Carolina ranked as the third-most popular destination state in 2014, behind Oregon and South Carolina, among the moving clients United Van Lines served in 48 states and Washington, D.C.

“We’re kind of a destination market, and a lot of people who look to retire here are looking for a warmer climate, less hectic quality of life,” said Sherri Pickard, president of the Wilmington Regional Association of Realtors and managing broker for Coldwell Banker Sea Coast Advantage.

“We have people moving to the area that we fondly refer to as half-backs. A lot of times those are people who have relocated from the Northeast into Florida and find that maybe the climate is not as friendly as they thought it was because it gets pretty hot there in the summer, and so they come halfway back,” Pickard said. “We see people coming from the West Coast to the East Coast. People move for so many different reasons, and it’s hard to paint any of this with a broad brush, but traditionally we’ve had a strong relationship with the Northeast as far as relocations.”

The timing of an improving economy appeared to coincide with an increase in moves to Wilmington from other states, Realtors said.

“It seemed like there was almost a faucet that got turned off in 2008 because there was downward pressure on prices across the country, here included,” Pickard said. “But it’s not just pricing that determines when somebody chooses to buy or sell.”

In one of her top blog posts for 2014, the director of Carolina Demography at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Carolina Population Center asked the question, “Why do people move to
North Carolina?”

The answer is not an easy one, Rebecca Tippett wrote.

“Migration is traditionally the most difficult demographic process to measure. Reasons for migration are even more difficult to capture, and we are typically left to infer conclusions based on other data elements and anecdotes,” she wrote.

But the government’s Current Population Survey started directly asking movers why they moved in 2013, and the data shows that nearly half of individuals moving to North Carolina moved for work-related reasons, Tippett pointed out in the blog post.

The United Van Lines study of 2014 trends, released Jan. 2, also reveals the importance of employment, according to an expert who commented on the study for the company. 

“With economic stability growing nationally, the current migration patterns reflect longer-term trends of movement to the southern and western states, especially to those where housing costs are relatively lower, climates are more temperate and job growth has been at or
above the national average, among other factors,” said Michael Stoll, economist, professor and chair of the Department of Public Policy at the University of California, Los Angeles.