Renters from the Northeast, California and Washington state have been flocking to Sun Belt markets and driving up those rents, while the number of tenants opting not to renew leases in favor of buying a home keeps dropping, according to one of the country’s largest apartment owners.

MAA, the largest publicly traded U.S. real estate investment trust, said its properties in Nashville, Tennessee; Tampa, Florida; Charleston, South Carolina; and Phoenix, Arizona, were the top destinations for new tenants. The Memphis, Tennessee-based firm said in a report that its new renters were mostly moving from Illinois, primarily the Chicago area; New Jersey; New York; Washington state; Massachusetts; and California over the 12 months ended March 31.

The data confirms trends the industry has been seeing as people leave high-costs states for less expensive ones and as rising home prices keep renters in place. Both trends have been good for Sun Belt apartment markets.

“Leasing traffic remains high, solid job growth, accelerating migration trends to our Sun Belt markets and the higher pricing hurdles for single-family ownership continue to fuel strong demand for apartment housing,” Eric Bolton, MAA’s CEO, told investors back in April on its first-quarter earnings call. “Almost 14% of the new leases we wrote in the first quarter came from move-ins relocating" to the Sun Belt, which is nearly 2 percentage points higher than the first quarter of last year.

MAA is the second-largest owner of apartment units in the country behind Starwood Capital Group, based on the National Multifamily Housing Council's 2022 ranking.

Renters from Chicago mostly moved to Nashville, the Dallas-Fort Worth region and Columbia, South Carolina, MAA reported. Those leaving Washington state headed to Phoenix, Dallas-Fort Worth and greater Washington, D.C. MAA owns a property in Arlington County, Virginia, near where Seattle-based Amazon is building its East Coast headquarters that is expected to eventually employ 25,000 people.

Massachusetts renters went to Charlotte, North Carolina, or several cities in Florida, as did people from New York and New Jersey. Charleston drew from New York and New Jersey as well.

The REIT reported that Texas is a top destination for Californians, notably Dallas-Fort Worth and Austin, where the top profession of its renters in both areas is in the technology sector. Austin, in particular, has become a major technology hub where Fortune 500 companies have been relocating their headquarters or expanding their existing hubs, including Oracle, Tesla, Apple and Facebook.

Following jobs, though, isn’t the sole reason renters are leaving California. New remote working trends stemming from the pandemic have also helped.

“The rise of remote working has severed the traditional bond between the need to live where your job was located,” said Jay Lybik, CoStar’s national director of market analytics. “Lower cost of living metros have thus reaped increased migration of higher income households that in the past were unable to make the move to these cheaper locations due to lack of comparable employment.”

According to MAA, the average annual income among its renters in its top 10 markets increased 16% to $84,682 in the first quarter compared to the same time last year.

MAA's renters moving out for single-family homes declined over the previous year through the first quarter to push MAA’s turnover rate to a historic low, the REIT said in its presentation.

That has mirrored rising home prices over the past year but also home mortgage interest rates soaring in the first quarter. The result is that MAA has been able to increase rents, projecting that it will be able to raise rents 11% to 13% this year, compared to 5.2% last year.