Residential Migration and the COVID-19 Crisis: Towards an Urban Exodus in France?

Much has been written about the potential effect of the Covid-19 crisis on residential mobility. Based on owner and buyer estimates performed from January 2019 to September 2021 on the platform Meilleurs Agents, we are able to build flows of mobility intentions and analyze, using logit and nested logit models, how the pandemic has changed the probability that both urban and rural residents intend to relocate. We find that after a time of shock during the first lockdown, the desire to migrate, both to rural municipalities and to other catchment areas, increased as the pandemic and the restrictive measures continued, and was particularly pronounced after the end of the third and last lockdown. JEL: C35, R23