Jane was interviewed about her relocation expertise and her deep experience in helping clients to relocate from California and other states to the Nashville area.
Owning a home had never been something Kristopher Esqueda even thought about. He was a successful restaurateur in San Francisco, helping to open many popular restaurants such as Saison and Sons and Daughters, and every month he turned in a $3,500 rent check for a two-bedroom apartment in the Tenderloin. One day after visiting a friend in Nashville who had moved there from the Bay Area, Esqueda left his apartment, stepping over hypodermic needles and feces on his way to work and started to wonder whether his time in the city was up.
He’d enjoyed his time in Nashville, but decided to explore a few other places before making any decisions, spending a week in both Austin, Texas, and Richmond, Va., in 2018. Richmond was great, but it seemed like it was too small for him. Austin was “comfortable,” Esqueda said, but almost too comfortable. “I found that Austin reminded me too much of San Francisco. There were too many tech workers. It already seemed like it was the ‘it’ city.”
What ultimately sold him was the potential he saw in the city. “I met musicians, artists, creatives, teachers and they owned houses,” he said. “... I decided, let me take a chance on Nashville.”
He finally made the move in 2019. Within about six months, Esqueda said, he knew he’d made the right decision. He misses San Francisco’s great dim sum, good sushi and innovative wine bars, but he now owns a home and even made a career change as a realtor.
He’s since helped five more people from the Bay Area make the move to the Nashville area in his new profession, and feels like he has a specialty helping those from other major cities in the United States, like New York, relocate. He knows what they’re going through and they get excited to move from renter to owner. “As cheesy as it sounds,” he said, “it’s the American dream.”
Tennessee also has other benefits that those joining the Bay Area exodus are often seeking. Like Texas and Washington, Tennessee has no state income tax. Like Colorado and Nevada, Tennessee has a relatively low property tax rate. Especially for those priced out of the Bay Area housing market who are now able to keep their tech salaries and work remotely, cities like Nashville are likely to continue their rise in popularity.
It’s not just Bay Area residents, either. From January 2018 to June 30, 2021, at least 25 companies relocated their headquarters from California to Tennessee, according to a report by the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. GraphiteRx, a pharmacy marketplace platform, was one of them.
Founder and CEO David Zilberman was born in Israel but spent much of his adolescence in Silicon Valley. He later went to UC Berkeley and got into the tech community, working for and even founding and running a different startup for a few years. He launched GraphiteRx in 2018, and while the company was based in the East Bay, it didn’t yet have an office. Meanwhile, Zilberman found himself in Nashville more and more often. While he spent time in the city on work trips, he quickly figured out that while Nashville has a national reputation as “music city,” one of its largest industries is actually health care, and the city also has a burgeoning tech community. He learned that Amazon and Oracle both planned to expand there, and figured that if those two companies had chosen Nashville, they had likely done their due diligence to know the city could support the growth.
Zilberman had also been increasingly running into a problem in the Bay Area — he couldn’t hire the talent he was looking for. He speculates the big Bay Area tech companies like Google and Facebook were snagging a lot of the workforce, and his small startup just couldn’t compete with that. He started to consider other headquarters such as Austin; Boulder, Colo.; North and South Carolina; and Chicago, but, ultimately, Nashville stood out. “I saw that the tech ecosystem was still young, but it was growing and it felt like what Austin felt like 10 years ago,” Zilberman said. “... I was taking the long view and was thinking not three years down the road, but thinking 30 years down the road.”
Tech is doubling down in Tennessee. Aside from the obvious gains from big behemoths like Amazon, Facebook and Oracle opening offices there, smaller yet equally buzzy companies like Eventbrite, Lyft, Postmates and Houzz all have hubs in the city. The new Oracle office will employ 8,500 people alone. There have even been two tech “unicorns” that the city can boast about in 2021 — solar developer Silicon Ranch and software startup Built Technologies.
In 2020, The Wall Street Journal ranked Nashville the No. 2 hottest job market in the country. In order to meet the demand for tech talent, there’s even been a marketing campaign led by the Greater Nashville Technology Council, which hopes to double Nashville and Middle Tennessee’s tech workforce by 2025. The council is focusing its efforts on big cities where tech talent has been thriving for years — San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Boston and Washington, D.C. The council already estimates the tech talent pool has grown 51% in the past five years.
GraphiteRx opened its office in September 2019, and Zilberman and his family arrived in July 2020, selling their East Bay home and doubling their square footage in a new house in Nashville for the same price. Zilberman said he loves that his employees can own property and put down roots there — plus, he thinks the diversity of talent is actually better than the Bay Area.
Homeownership is certainly more attainable in Tennessee than the Bay Area, but with a growing city comes rising housing prices. Real estate brokerage firm Zillow’s data shows the typical home value of properties in Nashville is $376,729, and those values have gone up 20.2% over the past year. Rachel Capil, an East Bay real estate agent, said she was getting so many questions from Bay Area residents about moving to Tennessee she made a YouTube video to answer them and has been networking with Nashville realtors. “I think Tennessee is a really hot place to go right now,” she said. “It’s apparently the new Las Vegas, but in a good way.”
Jane Campbell, a realtor covering middle Tennessee, said she has had to remind out-of-state buyers that since they’ll be paying much less in property taxes, they can typically afford a slightly higher home price. Still, the competition has gotten fierce and she’s seeing things she’s never seen in nearly 18 years of real estate.
Campbell said she’s been organizing more Zoom calls than ever to help people get an understanding of the area before they make their first trip out to the state. “Many times they haven’t even been to the area. Two families I had last week, it was their first time out here ever and before that, we had done Zoom overviews of the area,” she said. “... This spring and summer it was madness. People will submit an offer before the showings start.”
It’s also the first time she has had to prepare buyers to possibly waive contingencies and work with the seller on when they want to close. “Whatever the seller wants, the seller can get,” she said, noting the period of time houses sit on the market is also shortening. “Almost every deal I’ve done this year has been a multiple offer deal, and I’ve had up to 22 offers.”
Campbell said she’s helped 15 to 20 people move from California in the past two years. Of those, she said she was often asked about mask requirements in schools and about parent involvement in education. “It’s the icing on the cake for people,” she said. “There were a decent amount of people moving before that but that seemed to accelerate the rate of people’s decision-making.”
Tennessee took the top spot in U-Haul’s annual migration analysis in 2020, noting that one-way U-Haul trucks driving into Tennessee jumped 12% year-over-year, while departures rose only 9% since 2019. “I’m seeing a lot of people from California move [to Tennessee] because they’re attracted to our lifestyle,” Jeff Porter, president of U-Haul Company of Nashville, said in a statement. “... Places like Nashville, Murfreesboro and Clarksville are attracting tons of new residents. Nashville is ever-growing, and even the era of COVID-19 isn’t slowing that. We were seeing movement before the virus hit, but I think the situation has pushed a lot more people away from the West Coast to our state.”
California has ranked 48th or lower on the list since 2016, the report said.
Overall, Campbell’s clients keep in touch and say they’re very happy with the move. “They say people are very friendly. They love the seasons and they love the hiking,” Campbell said. "...People do complain about the traffic, though."
It’s not just the tech community that’s trying to lure people to Tennessee, either. In November, Gov. Bill Lee filmed a YouTube video with a call out to law enforcement across the country to join its highway patrol, and said the state would even help pay moving costs. While many public agencies require COVID-19 vaccination, Lee promised in the video “we won't get between you and your doctor." It’s worth noting that death from COVID-19 was the top cause of death among on-duty officers in 2021, according to the Officer Down Memorial Page.
Not everyone moving to Tennessee instantly buys a home and Nashville still has a long way to go in terms of infrastructure improvements like better public transportation. Nashville native Ellen Fort returned to her home state after living in the Bay Area for nearly 10 years. She and her husband had been contemplating a move to be closer to family — hers is in Tennessee, his is in Florida — since 2019, but when the pandemic hit in March 2020, they were both left jobless. It made the decision easier, Fort said, and it helped that their lease happened to be up at the end of the month. They packed up everything they owned into a POD unit, and rented an RV to drive cross country and move in with Fort’s mother temporarily.
“We wanted a place where it was easier to live, with children especially,” Fort said, mentioning they had also looked at other cities on the West Coast. “We wanted our money to go further. If I was going to leave I wanted it to be actually cheaper.”
She said initially it was a bit of a culture shock to be back in Nashville, but she’s finally settling in. She said it helps that her family is spread out in a rental that’s about 1,000 more square feet than their Oakland home was for about $1,000 less per month. But she’s still not ready to buy, and she worries the same problems she saw in the Bay Area are starting to happen in Nashville, a city known for its creative culture, musicians and teachers. “My worry is, like San Francisco, they’re finding it harder to afford to live here now,” she said. “It’s not quite as dire, but it’s the same old story.”
When Fort goes to drop her kids off at school, she sees plenty of out-of-state license plates in the line of cars, including many from California. She said she’s even been called a “unicorn” several times lately — a term for someone who is actually from the city of Nashville — which isn’t something she’d ever heard used before to describe someone born there. She said those like her are just harder to find these days with all the transplants. “Everyone likes to joke you can’t buy a house because the Californians are coming and they’re buying them all,” Fort said. “… In some ways, it’s great for business, but as a native Nashvillian I feel very concerned for the soul of Nashville.”
Click here for a link to the original article in the SFG
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