Skip to Main Content
Real Estate
Agents in South Carolina, the fastest growing state in the country last year, say that many newcomers are Republicans eager to leave the Northeast and West Coast.
By Eduardo Medina, New York Times Service
updated on April 18, 2024 | 1:20 PM
Jen Hubbell is the lead agent in South Carolina for Conservative Move, a Texas-based company that helps conservatives migrate to solidly red places. Will Crooks / The New York Times
GREENVILLE, S.C. — Jen Hubbell became a real estate agent in Greenville, South Carolina, because she believed a good life started with a good home, and now her phone buzzed regularly with calls from out-of-state clients who believed they could find both things in her city.
Many were staunch conservatives from deeply blue states such as New York, Washington and California, fed up with the politics there. Could Hubbell, a conservative herself, help them find neighborhoods of like-minded people?
Her response was always emphatic: “You are going to love it here.”
Hubbell is the lead agent in South Carolina for Conservative Move, a Texas-based company that helps conservatives migrate to solidly red places. (“When your community no longer reflects morals and values, it might be time to move,” its website says.) And with South Carolina surpassing Florida last year as the fastest-growing state in the country, she is keeping very busy.
The in-migration has fueled a yearslong real estate boom across South Carolina, where Republicans have controlled the governor’s mansion and Legislature for more than two decades. Real estate agents like Hubbell say many of their clients are religious conservatives whose reasons for moving include opposition to policies such as abortion access, support for transgender rights and vaccine mandates during the pandemic.
Paul Chabot, the founder and president of Conservative Move, which works with about 500 agents across the country, said that when he started his company in 2017, there were not a lot of people asking to go to South Carolina.
In the last two years, however, it has joined Texas and Florida among the top three states that the company’s clients are buying homes in, Chabot said. About 5,000 people in its clientele database have expressed interest in moving to South Carolina soon.
Falls Park in downtown Greenville. Last year, about 15,500 New Yorkers, 15,000 Californians and 36,000 North Carolinians moved to South Carolina. Will Crooks / The New York Times
Most of the company’s clients in South Carolina have chosen to buy a house in Greenville County, which is in a deeply conservative and Christian region known as the Upstate. The county had the second-largest population growth in the state from 2020-22, behind Horry County, which encompasses Myrtle Beach and has more expensive houses.
Hubbell, along with half a dozen real estate agents who do not work with Conservative Move but whose experience has mirrored hers,