I S S U E N O . 1 7
Week of November 3, 2026
From the Editor
Every few years a piece of data lands that is interesting mostly for who it annoys. This summer it was a migration report showing that the state with the strongest pull in the country, measured as moving searches in for every one out, is not Florida. It is South Carolina. Florida is running third.
I have watched buyers default to Florida for twenty years, often without running a single comparison. So this issue runs one. The Carolinas against Florida, five categories, no ties, and honest in both directions. Two categories Florida wins cleanly. One it loses badly. The other two come down to what kind of year you want to live, and whether a barn is part of it.
Damian Hall
CHIEF RELOCATION OFFICER, SOUTHERN ESCAPES
The Brief
The Sunshine Tax
Start with the number that started the argument. In moveBuddha's first-half-2026 migration data, South Carolina ranked first in the country, with 2.02 inbound moving searches for every one headed out. North Carolina came fifth, at 1.49. Florida, the state most people still name first when you ask where Americans are moving, came third, at 1.52.
A search is a daydream, not a van in the driveway, and a moving quote is the cheapest thing a person can do about a feeling. Two more honest notes before anyone frames the ranking. The ratio measures pull, not crowd size: by raw volume Florida still draws about three in ten of the country's net inbound searches, more than any other state. And Myrtle Beach, a retirement-priced coast, carries a good share of South Carolina's number. So the ranking is not the story. The story is that for the first time in a generation, households who would once have signed in Florida on reflex are running a real comparison first. Here is that comparison.
Comparing two entire states is a stunt, and we will not pretend otherwise. Naples and Jacksonville share a flag and little else, and the same is true of Charleston and Asheville. What does travel across a whole state is the math of owning there. So we scored the five things that actually move a decision, and we let each one pick a side, no ties.
The tax bill goes to Florida, cleanly. Florida charges no state income tax. South Carolina's top rate is 5.21 percent for 2026, cut from 6 percent under a law signed in March that is built to keep falling if revenue allows. North Carolina runs a flat 3.99 percent, is scheduled to drop again next year, and on Tuesday its voters wrote a 3.5 percent ceiling into the state constitution, down from the 7 percent cap it carried before, by about 61 to 39 percent in the AP's count. On a seven-figure income the difference against zero is still real money every April, and anyone who waves it off is selling something. Concede the category you could fudge, and you earn the right to the next one.
The insurance bill goes to the Carolinas, and it is not close. The average homeowners premium in Florida runs about $8,471 a year. South Carolina averages $2,870 and North Carolina $3,799, against a national average of $2,872, by insurance.com's September 2026 figures. That is a gap of roughly $5,600 a year between Florida and South Carolina, every year you own the house. In fairness, Florida's number is moving the right way: on October 29 its insurance regulator announced rate decreases for about 824,000 policyholders, the largest of them 12 percent. Take 12 percent off $8,471 and you are still paying two and a half times South Carolina's average. Put the two bills on one page and the no-income-tax pitch gets quieter. The tax you save in April you can hand back to your carrier by June.
Getting out goes to Florida, but the lead is shrinking. Florida's big airports still run more nonstops to more places than Charleston or Greenville-Spartanburg do, and in February that matters. The gap is closing on purpose. Breeze begins nonstop service between Greenville-Spartanburg and West Palm Beach on December 18, and United has put Charleston to San Francisco on its schedule for March 28, 2027, four days a week. The Carolinas are buying their way off the one-stop itinerary one route at a time.
The year goes to the Carolinas, if you want four seasons. This is the category a spreadsheet cannot hold. The Carolinas give you a real autumn, mountains and coast within a morning of each other, and towns that keep a pulse in the off-season because residents, not visitors, set the calendar. Florida gives you water warm enough to swim in for half the year that the Carolinas cannot match, and a season that hollows certain towns out by July. Neither is a flaw. They are different years, and you are buying a year, not a brochure.
The acre goes to the Carolinas, and I will show my work. I learned farm brokerage in the Tryon foothills, so take the bias as declared. Florida owns the winter circuit: Wellington's show season and the World Equestrian Center in Ocala pull the sport south from January into March, and the land is priced like it. Farmland in Wellington traded at $844,000 an acre in the year through September 2025, by the Wellington Land Report's count. Nobody publishes a closed-sale series for the Tryon corridor, and the asking prices on equestrian land there run in the tens of thousands per acre, so read that gap as a direction rather than a ratio; it is asks against closings. What the Carolinas have is Tryon International, which finished hosting the 143rd National Horse Show on November 1, Aiken's winter season with the 2,100 acres of Hitchcock Woods in the middle of town, and acreage you can still buy by the hundred. If you ride for a living, Florida. If you ride because you live there, the Carolinas.
Who it is not for
Not the Carolinas, if you need an ocean you can swim in at Christmas, a nonstop to almost anywhere on a Tuesday, or a February that does not empty the mountain towns. And the income tax is real: 5.21 percent in South Carolina, 3.99 in North Carolina, zero in Florida.
Not Florida, if an insurance bill that moves with the storm season reads to you as an ownership cost rather than a weather event, if you want a town that keeps its pulse in July, or if the marquee markets no longer look like a bargain against anything else on your list.
So who wins? Not a state. A household. The buyer in their late fifties, optimizing cost of ownership and flight access, will weigh that tax bill hardest, and Florida has a real case. The family still working, moving school-age children, usually finds the Carolinas' seasons, schools and shorter insurance bill add up first. The buyer who will use the place eight weeks a year is really choosing a climate and a drive to the gate, and should set the two bills side by side before anything else.
Run your own numbers. The tax you will save and the premium you will pay are both knowable today, to the dollar, for any address on your list. Ask for both before you ask for the view.
T H E M I G R A T I O N L I N E
2.02
South Carolina's inbound-to-outbound moving-search ratio in the first half of 2026: 2.02 searches in for every one out, first in the country, ahead of Florida's 1.52 and North Carolina's 1.49.
Source: moveBuddha mid-year 2026 migration report, published July 13, 2026: 97,706 moving-cost searches, January 1 to July 7.
Pass the Ledger
You know the one. The friend who keeps saying they will just move to Florida and has never once run the insurance number. Forward them this issue. It settles the question in five categories, no ties.
New here because a smart friend forwarded this? The Ledger lands every Tuesday at 7 AM.
The Pulse
What is actually happening in the places we cover. New on the site, and a standing section here every Tuesday.
Credit: Arch Gate
No. 01 Charleston · The Sword Gate House asks $35 million.
The Sword Gate House at 32 Legare Street went on the market on October 19 at $35 million. If it sells near the ask, it would set a single-family record for the city. The current owners bought it in 2020 for $10 million and made it move-in ready; it runs to 17,142 square feet on close to an acre, with a carriage house. The Post and Courier has the listing.
Credit: Arch Gate
Credit: Arch Gate
No. 02 Greenville County · A 500-acre estate near Fountain Inn asks $30 million.
The 500 acres at 2967 Allen Bridge Road, with a 15,000-square-foot main house, four barns, spring-fed ponds and frontage on Durbin Creek, listed on October 30 at $30 million. The Upstate's residential record is $10.099 million, set on Lake Keowee in March 2025, and two Lake Keowee listings are already asking above it. Three asks above the record in one autumn, none of them closed: the asks are the signal, and a closing would be the proof. The Post and Courier has the listing.
No. 03 Lake Keowee · Pickens County weighs a lakefront overlay.
Pickens County is studying an overlay district covering everything within a quarter mile of Lake Keowee and Lake Jocassee, meant to protect drinking water and shoreline; it would bar new townhomes, commercial use and lawn chemicals inside the buffer. Council voted 5 to 1 on October 19 to scope an environmental study, and at least one developer has warned of lawsuits. South Carolina Public Radio has the hearing.
Destination Spotlight
Pawleys Island and the Hammock Coast
If the lead essay has a single place attached to it, it is here. The Hammock Coast is Georgetown County's stretch between Myrtle Beach and Charleston, a name the county adopted in 2010 and has since trademarked, after the rope hammock a riverboat captain, Joshua John Ward, designed in 1889 because the Navy's were too hot for a Lowcountry summer. His Pawleys Island Hammock is still woven in Pawleys today.
Pawleys Island itself is four miles of sand a quarter mile wide, one of the oldest summer resorts on the East Coast, settled in the 1700s by rice planters escaping the fever season inland. It calls itself arrogantly shabby and means it: weathered cottages, creek docks, no high-rises, a storm legend called the Gray Man, and a town that did not bother to incorporate until 1985. A few miles north in Murrells Inlet, Brookgreen Gardens, founded in 1931 by Archer and Anna Hyatt Huntington, is the oldest public sculpture garden in the country, with the Huntingtons' own Atalaya across the highway in a state park that has leased its land from Brookgreen's trustees since 1960.
It is the same argument the lead essay makes, in sand rather than foothills. Nobody moves to the Hammock Coast to be seen. They come for the water, the oaks and a porch, which is the whole point of the category the Carolinas keep winning.
The Calendar
Decided, November 3 · North Carolina voters approved the amendment lowering the state's constitutional income-tax ceiling from 7 percent to 3.5 percent, about 61 to 39 percent per the AP. It does not change anyone's rate yet; it limits how high future legislatures can go.
Sundays, through November 8 · Aiken fall polo, Sunday afternoons on Whitney Field.
Opens November 27 · Nights of a Thousand Candles at Brookgreen Gardens in Murrells Inlet, 21 evenings of candlelight through January 3; it opens Thanksgiving weekend.
November 28 · Clemson hosts South Carolina, a rivalry that dates to 1896.
December 18 · Breeze Airways begins nonstop service between Greenville-Spartanburg and West Palm Beach, Mondays and Fridays.
The Insider
The brochure sells you the tax you will not pay. The ledger is the premium you will. Only one of those numbers comes back every year you own the place.
On running the real comparison
Next Tuesday the Ledger closes the Belonging series with the family compound, and a wealth-transfer number that two credible sources still cannot agree on. A Weekend Escape lands when the market is right for it.
If a number in this issue changed your model, reply and tell me which one. I read every reply.
Damian Hall
DAMIAN HALL GROUP / SOUTHERN ESCAPES
The intelligence layer between where you are and where you belong.
Southern Escapes is the market intelligence platform of Damian Hall Group, the principal-led luxury team operating under Blackstream | Christie's International Real Estate. This newsletter is for informational purposes. Nothing here is tax, financial, or legal advice. Run your scenario with your advisor before you act on it.
Know someone still defaulting to Florida? Forward this to them.