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Las Vegas is the most popular U.S. destination for non-local home shoppers, Minneapolitans don’t want to move out of the area – and hardly anybody else wants to move in – and Texans seem to mostly love living in Texas. These are just a few of the takeaways from a new Zillow analysis of search data in the largest U.S. markets that provides a glimpse of where Americans aspire to find their next home.
Las
Vegas gets the biggest share of Zillow traffic from outside of its
metro area of any of the 50 largest U.S. metros, due mainly to heavy
interest from Los Angeles. Nearly 61% of page views of Las Vegas
homes come from non-local searchers, with 17.9% coming from Los
Angeles/Orange County – the highest share from a non-neighboring
metro anywhere in the country. When you also account for the 2.8% of
views coming from Riverside, that’s more than a fifth of all Las
Vegas home searches coming from the broader Los Angeles area.
The
other large metros with a majority of searches coming from outside
are Jacksonville, San Antonio, Riverside, Raleigh and New Orleans.
As
an affordability ceiling has been reached in the most expensive areas
of the country, search habits seem to suggest locals in these areas
are at least considering a move to less-expensive pastures. In
addition to Las Vegas, a relatively high share of searches by Los
Angeles residents were on homes in Phoenix (2.6%) and San Diego
(2.5%). Meanwhile, Sacramento is being looked at by residents of the
Bay Area, taking up 6.5% of searches from San Francisco and 5.1% from
San Jose. New Yorkers are viewing places up and down the Eastern
Seaboard from Philadelphia (2.3% of New York searches), all the way
down to Miami (2%).
“Americans
tend to be mobile, regularly seeking out new homes in an effort to
balance career opportunities, family needs and the kinds of
lifestyles available in our diverse country,” said Zillow
Economist Jeff Tucker. “The homes people view on Zillow paint a
real-time picture of Americans’ changing aspirations and preferences,
sometimes years before they show up in public survey data. Search
trends from 2019 reveal the ongoing movement of people out of the
Northeast, as New Yorkers especially drift southward into the Sun
Belt, and a few Midwestern cities where households are likely to stay
put – St. Louis, Detroit and Cleveland. And in another way, they
demonstrate our curious nature. Whether they’re considering a job
they don’t end up taking, checking out a place a friend just moved
into or simply daydreaming about what life might be like in another
part of the country, vastly more people view listings in another city
than actually move out of town in any given year.”
When
looking at places where the largest share of searches come from
locals, it makes sense that the biggest metros top the list – they by
definition have more potential searchers. However, the
Minneapolis-St. Paul metro beats the odds to rank third in the
country despite having the 16th-biggest population. Just 24.1% of
searches on Twin Cities homes come from outside of the area,
indicating that residents want to stick around and few others want to
join them.
On
the other side of the coin are metros where locals are looking at
homes anywhere but in their hometown. Topping that list with just
30.1% of residents’ searches being done on local homes, perhaps
surprisingly, is Nashville, one of the fastest-growing cities of the
past few years. This could show that residents are looking elsewhere
after the rapid price increases during the population boom, or simply
mean that Nashvillians are more curious about out-of-town real estate
than the average American. The other metros with the lowest shares of
local searches are Salt Lake City (31.1%), San Jose (35.3%), Orlando
(37.2%) and Charlotte (39%).
Texans
may disagree on sports allegiances and where you can find the best
barbecue, but it appears they typically agree that if they do move,
they want it to be elsewhere in the state. Outside searches from
three of the four largest metros in Texas – Houston, San Antonio and
Austin – are most often on homes in other Texas metros. But residents
in Dallas-Fort Worth may be yearning to make their way out of the
Lone Star State – their most popular destinations are Oklahoma City
and Tulsa.
Source: realtybiznews.com