Member Article

Global Moving Trends: Out of the United Kingdom

With the recent Brexit kerfuffle and the extent of the vote’s consequences yet to be fully detailed, more people in the UK are looking to up sticks while they can.

MoveHub, international relocations experts, analysed over 180,000 of our customers’ moves to find out which destinations are the most attractive to people from the UK, among other countries.

Professional migrants

One demographic group in particular stood out during the analysis, a group MoveHub have called ‘professional migrants’ due to their primary reasons for seeking a new life abroad:

• job opportunities
• a new experience
• financial independence

This group contains people between 25 and 44 years old, and are a solid 33% of the enquiries MoveHub receives.

Additionally, this label can be applied to retirees and recent university leavers, as anyone who is focused on a career and has the wanderlust bug can be dubbed a professional migrant. This group will pack up and ship their belongings across oceans to start a new chapter in their careers.

Reasons behind international moves

When surveyed on the different reasons behind their international moves, 54.4 per cent of people moving out of the UK named the weather as a driving factor. In the middle of a summer such as the one the UK experiencing at the moment, it is not too big a stretch to understand the motivation.

Following behind weather, 31.5 per cent of people said high housing prices as a driving force behind their international move. The fears over the EU referendum have forced landlords to increase their asking prices in addition to yearly inflation.

However, only 25.3 per cent of people told MoveHub that low job prospects was a key reason to move out of the UK.

Professional migrants do not move because they are forced to, rather to pursue other opportunities elsewhere. The abundance of jobs in cities like London

Where Brits are moving

There are certain countries that have a history of being attractive to Brits, and will be towards the top of this list for years to come.

10 of the top 20 destination countries are within the European Union, while eight are in the Commonwealth. This shows that Brits are moving to where it is the easiest in terms of visas and allowances.

A third more Britons are applying for Irish passports for the first time. The number of British born adults applying for their first Irish passport based on ancestry is up by 33 per cent from 2014, and Ireland’s DFA has kindly requested people to postpone applying for Irish citizenship.

According to Ireland’s Department of Foreign Affairs, the wait time for a passport pre-Brexit vote was 7-8 weeks.

Percentage of total moves from the United Kingdom

1. Australia - 13.65%
2. USA - 12.32%
3. Spain - 8.41%
4. France - 5.36%
5. Canada - 5.09%
6. Ireland - 4.53%
7. UAE - 4.51%
8. New Zealand - 3.72%
9. Germany - 3.23%
10. South Africa - 2.21%
11. Italy - 2.10%
12. India - 2.05%
13. Portugal - 1.90%
14. Sweden - 1.66%
15. Cyprus - 1.61%
16. Netherlands - 1.50%
17. Singapore - 1.17%
18. Greece - 1.15%
19. Thailand - 1.01%
20. Malaysia - 0.99%

View the whitepaperin its entirety for a global focus on moving trends.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by MoveHub .