People move toward affordability, weather, and lower taxes, and housing demand follows them. Movement out of high-tax states into low-tax or no-income-tax states like Tennessee, Florida, Arizona, and Texas has been a steady driver. The high-tax states are frequently the same high home-price states, so the move can improve a household's monthly math twice over. One footnote: low-income-tax states usually make it up somewhere, often in property taxes, so the total cost gap can be smaller than the headline suggests. Weather pulls people too. The Southeast has drawn buyers for the climate and, historically, cheaper homes. That price advantage narrows over time, because an inflow of buyers into an affordable region erodes the very affordability that attracted them. Migration is self-correcting that way. A caution on the headlines: stories about a state emptying out tend to be overstated. Even in places with real net outmigration, enormous numbers of people still live there and still buy homes, so 'everyone is leaving California' is a narrative you cannot build a purchase around. For a buyer, migration is a slow, powerful force on demand that plays out locally. Look at where jobs and people are actually flowing in your target metro rather than trading on the national story.