Alone, alienated, and ostracized: Politicalized real estate firms want to help you flee blue states for red ones and vice versa — are they worth it?

“I was living in Tennessee when Roe versus Wade got overturned, and the reaction around me was like a cold shot of water to the face,” Muller told Moneywise. “I knew it was a conservative state, but the overwhelming number of celebrations for women losing access to a medical procedure was something I could no longer look past.”

To Muller, the discourse had become overwhelmingly around religious beliefs rather than access to medical care for women. But it wasn’t the only hot-button political issue.

“That followed with more news of school shootings and Tennessee’s solution to simply arm teachers,” Muller noted. “Even though I didn’t have children, I could not wrap my head around the idea that the solution to shootings in schools was to bring in more guns.”

Muller said she’d been considering a move to a larger city for a few months, but these two things made it clear.

“Going forward, being within Tennessee would not be an option for me,” she said.

Muller visited Chicago when she ran the marathon in 2022 and absolutely loved it.

“But before I made any decisions about whether that was the place for me to go, I did my research on Illinois laws and representatives,” she added. “I needed to know that I’d be moving to a place where the local and state government recognize me, a woman, as a person capable of making her own decisions and that her life was worth protecting. When I saw there was alignment on those points, I knew I was moving in the right direction.”

And it’s not only a matter of blue voters fleeing red states. It’s occurring the other way around, as well.

“The majority of client calls I receive are from people that are fed up with taxes and politics of blue states like California, Washington and Illinois,” Mike Zschunke, an associate broker at Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Arizona Properties, told Moneywise.

“They’re looking to move to Arizona for quality of life and are tired of the way the Democratic states are going. They don’t mind paying taxes as long as the administration is responsible for distributing those taxes within a state budget.”

Zschunke said there’s “definitely evidence” of Californians relocating to Arizona merely by looking at population flows out of California and into Arizona.

“Many of my clients are small business owners looking to move to a more business-friendly state such as Arizona,” he noted. “While it’s unfortunate that political divide has brought citizens to up and leave the neighborhoods they grew up in, many of our clients find that in Arizona there is a feeling of ‘we made it.’”

A cottage industry grows around pulling up stakes for political reasons

Even 20 years ago, it was common to find conservative Democrats (especially in the South) and liberal Republicans (particularly in the Northeast). Over time, those crossovers largely disappeared, with conservatives gravitating toward states with a Republican Party vibe and liberals toward states that included more Democrats. By 2022, high-profile studies started stating that “at no point since the Civil War have partisans been as clustered within individual states as today.”

Soon enough, companies — mostly real estate agencies — began catering to politically disaffected consumers and offering to help them move to a new state or abroad that better aligned with their political ideologies.

Companies like Texas-based Conservative Move, which aids conservatives in finding new homes in more politically aligned states, and TexasPride Realty Group, which offers a service called “Flee Red States” to liberals to find a new home outside of the Lone Star State that leans their way politically.

Paul Chabot, a retired U.S. Navy commander who launched Conservative Move in 2017, told NPR that most of his clients “feel like they can’t talk politics with people on their street.”

“It’s not like people are leaving just because they hate democrats,” he added. “They don’t like democrat policies, but they really feel like they’re alone, alienated, ostracized,” he says.

On its website, Flee Red States echoes that sentiment, at least from a political outlook: “If you feel the need to leave the jurisdiction of a Red State, let us help you sell your property here and connect you with an LGBTQIA+ or ally agent in a better location of your choice.”

The business is licensed in Texas and has affiliates in all 50 states and several counties.

That’s not to say that real estate agents who offer political homebuying focus only on that factor. As always, affordability and other issues matter, too.

“From a moving-industry perspective, political preferences appear to be one factor in relocation decisions, but rarely the only one,” Bojan Mladenovic, founder of Move-Price, a New York City-based company that provides moving cost estimates to buyers and connects them with moving companies, told Moneywise.

Mladenovic said his company tracks moving costs across all 50 states and he consistently sees heavy migration corridors such as California to Texas, New York to Florida, and California to Arizona.

“These are expensive moves,” he noted. “A typical two-bedroom household moving from California to Texas spends roughly $7,350 to $8,400 with professional movers. People don’t make that kind of financial commitment casually.”