The Lowcountry has been a high-end destination for a long time. Anyone who's been around Hilton Head, Palmetto Bluff, Sea Pines, Belfair, Colleton River, or any of the other plantation and master-planned communities knows the affluence here didn't show up yesterday — it's been part of the area's identity going back to the 1950s when Charles Fraser started developing Sea Pines, and there have been generations of wealthy buyers finding this stretch of coast ever since.

What's actually changed in the last few years isn't the area's affluence. It's the size and shape of the affluent buyer pool that's now reaching it. And if you own a higher-end home here and are thinking about selling, it's worth understanding who that pool actually is right now, because the data tells a really specific story.

What the IRS Migration Data Shows

The most recent IRS migration data covers 2022 to 2023 and was released in early 2026. Worth noting upfront: IRS migration data runs about three years behind real time because of how long it takes to process and match address changes across millions of tax returns. So 2022–2023 sounds dated, but it's actually the freshest income-and-migration data that exists anywhere — every analyst and economist citing wealth migration patterns right now is working with this same dataset.

Here's what it shows for South Carolina:

According to SmartAsset's analysis of IRS data, South Carolina ranked fourth in the entire country for the most high-earning households moving in, with a net gain of 5,270 households earning $200,000 a year or more. Only Florida, Texas, and North Carolina pulled in more.

The average income of the high-earning households moving to South Carolina was around $501,000 a year — higher than the average for high earners moving to North Carolina ($456,000) and right in line with the most affluent inbound migration in the country. That's not a vague "the area is growing" stat — it's a documented snapshot of who is actually relocating here and what they're earning.

The Tax Foundation's analysis of the same IRS data shows South Carolina gained $4 billion in net adjusted gross income from interstate migration in 2023, placing it among the top destinations in the country alongside Florida, Texas, North Carolina, and Arizona. And while we can't yet cite 2024 or 2025 IRS numbers (because they don't exist yet), the Census Bureau's 2025 population estimates and South Carolina's own state-level reporting both show the migration patterns haven't reversed — if anything, they've accelerated, with South Carolina leading the nation in growth in 2025 and Jasper County right next door ranking as the fastest-growing county in the entire United States.

What This Means for High-End Sellers

When most people think about who buys a luxury home in our area, the mental picture is usually pretty narrow — maybe a retiring couple from the Northeast, maybe a second-home buyer from Atlanta. That picture isn't wrong, but it's incomplete, because the buyer profile has gotten significantly broader.

The IRS data, combined with NAR's 2025 buyer and seller report, paints a more complete picture: today's high-end buyer pool for the Lowcountry includes equity-rich relocators from California and New York escaping high state taxes, executives and professionals in their 40s and 50s buying primary residences (not just retirement homes), all-cash buyers at historic highs (26% of all buyers nationally paid cash in 2025, per NAR), and high earners specifically choosing South Carolina over Florida because of the lower cost of luxury living and meaningful property tax benefits for primary residents.

That's a really different buyer pool than the area saw fifteen or twenty years ago. The buyer for a $1.5M to $5M+ home today is often younger than people assume, has more liquid wealth than people assume, and is making the move from a much wider range of origin cities than the old Northeast-to-Lowcountry pipeline suggests.

Why This Matters for Marketing a Luxury Home

The marketing challenge for a high-end home isn't really about presentation quality at this price point — most luxury listings have professional photography, drone footage, the basics. The actual gap shows up in two specific places.

The first is reaching buyers who aren't yet in the local search funnel. A buyer in Northern California or Greenwich, Connecticut who's been considering a move for a year isn't sitting on Zillow watching Bluffton specifically — they're watching multiple markets at once, comparing Charleston to Hilton Head to Naples to Wilmington. The luxury home that gets noticed is the one that's actively being put in front of those buyers in the cities they currently live in, not the one waiting passively for them to find it. That requires a marketing approach built around where high earners are right now, not where the home is.

The second is the level of context the listing has to provide. A high-earning buyer making a primary residence move is not flipping through listings casually — they're doing real due diligence on community fees, club initiations, transfer fees, regime structures (where applicable), property tax situations, and lifestyle fit. Listings that surface this information clearly tend to do better than listings that leave the buyer to figure it out on their own. The buyer for a luxury Lowcountry home knows what they're looking at and what questions they need answered, and the marketing has to meet them at that level.

The Bigger Picture

The Lowcountry isn't becoming affluent. It already is, and has been for decades. What's actually changed is the size of the buyer pool reaching for it — a much bigger and more diverse group of qualified buyers is showing up here now than even five years ago. South Carolina is in the top tier of wealth migration destinations in the country, the trend is supported by every dataset we have access to, and the patterns showing up in the 2022–2023 IRS data have only strengthened in the 2024 and 2025 Census data.

For sellers of higher-end homes in Hilton Head, Bluffton, Palmetto Bluff, Beaufort, and the surrounding communities, the question worth asking is whether the marketing of your home is actually built around that reality — or whether it's still treating the buyer pool as it looked a decade ago.

If you're thinking about selling a higher-end home in the Lowcountry in the next several months and want to talk through how the buyer pool for your specific community looks right now, and what a marketing plan might look like that's built around the way these buyers actually search and decide, Jules and I are happy to grab coffee and walk through it with no pressure or pitch, just a real conversation about your home and the market it's going into.

Data sources: IRS Statistics of Income Migration Data, 2022–2023 release (March 2026); SmartAsset analysis of IRS migration data; Tax Foundation State Migration Trends analysis; U.S. Census Bureau 2025 Population Estimates (March 2026 release); National Association of Realtors 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers (November 2025); South Carolina Department of Employment and Workforce.

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Jeff & Jules Moran
Anchor & Isle Real Estate
Bluffton & Hilton Head Island

Strategic Marketing. Experienced Negotiation. Real Results.
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