If you look closely at the patterns of people and businesses moving around the world in recent years, you’ll see that both are moving toward places that offer more economic freedom and efficiency. North America is the best example of this.

The California Gold Rush of the 1800s drew tens of thousands of people who left their homes behind. They ran out from the East’s stagnant economy and tight structure in search of more than just gold: they wanted economic freedom and opportunity.

When LeBron James joined the Miami Heat in 2010, he took a pay cut. He also thought about how Florida has no state income tax, which was like a “salary increase” for him. Even if the Heat wasn’t the ideal pick for his reputation at the time, the selection made a lot of sense from a financial and lifestyle point of view.

A lot of Fortune 500 firms and their CEOs are moving to lower their taxes and costs of doing business. Elon Musk moved Tesla’s headquarters from California to Austin in 2021 because he liked how cheap it was there. In 2020, Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison moved to Texas to save millions in taxes and find a better business environment and more talented workers. These executives are not only saving shareholders money, but they’re also giving employees more real income and a better quality of life. This is the modern form of “economic gold.”

But how do these incidents directly affect wealthy households in North America? My answer is that they can identify and take part in opportunities during the “process” of movement and development, not just the “results” that come after migration.

If you look closely at the data from the Federal Reserve, you can see that the businesses that grew the fastest in 2024 were energy, financial services, and construction. These were the key areas that benefited from companies moving. Tesla’s Gigafactory and Oracle’s large-scale personnel relocations have created a full ecosystem. Construction businesses are creating new facilities, financial institutions are managing new business, and energy providers are making sure there is enough supply. With the Texas governor in charge, more than 2.5 million new employment have created a positive feedback cycle of people moving to the state and needing homes and services. This structural migration isn’t just numbers on a map or job data; it’s highly important for every investor since it helps them decide how to divide up their assets.

So, when people and businesses move to Texas, Florida, North Carolina, and other regions, the first thing they need is regular housing that the middle class can “afford to live in.” There are too many luxury apartments in city centres or too many empty ones, yet there aren’t enough multi-family homes in strong school districts on the outskirts of the city. Developers gain from stable yield growth and rental income from new rental buildings. As more people move in, these places, which aren’t very fancy, are the real starting sites for the next wave of wealth transfer.

If wealthy families and investors can find and invest in iterative private equity portfolios that include developers who can steadily grow their capital, they would be like the survivors of the 2009 financial crisis, taking advantage of stable and safe returns in future markets while positioning themselves early in assets with supply-demand mismatch advantages, becoming “capitalists who reap without sowing.”