Coming and Going: What Home Views Do, and Don’t, Reveal About Our Potential Moves
- Homes in the San Francisco and Austin areas receive a high number of page views from outsiders, but half of San Francisco and Austin residents shopping for real estate are looking in other areas.
- Both outsiders and locals are shopping for homes in the Seattle and Portland areas. In Minneapolis, New York, and Pittsburgh, a relatively high percent of page views come from residents within those areas, rather than from outsiders.
- Few outsiders are shopping in New Orleans, Miami and Detroit – and those who already live there are looking for homes in other places.
In fashion, as it has been famously said, you’re either in or you’re out. And real estate is often the same way in certain markets, with more people either looking to move in – based on the homes they view in different markets on Zillow – or looking to move out.
Unless, of course, people are both looking to potentially move in and move out of a given area.
Using Zillow page view data on for-sale and unlisted homes in June 2016, we determined which markets are attracting the most views from users in areas far away, and which markets are home to the most searchers viewing homes farther away. We found clear trends in both lists of markets – and a good amount of overlap between them, as well.
Inside, Looking Out
A majority of American adults have never lived outside the state they grew up in, and more than a third have never lived outside their home town.[1] And when most Americans do move, they typically don’t go very far – of those who moved between 2008 and 2009, two-thirds stayed in the same county, and 80 percent stayed in the same state.[2]
It makes sense to assume, then, that people use Zillow to look at homes near them. Right? Not quite. We found that roughly two in five (41.4 percent) of the homes users look at are located outside their metropolitan area.[3] Still, users do tend to eye homes in metros close to them, and their propensity to look beyond their own home market varies by where they live.
Top 10 markets with the most home page views in other areas:
- San Antonio, TX
- Austin, TX
- New Orleans, LA
- Washington, DC
- Nashville, TN
- Charlotte, NC
- San Diego, CA
- San Francisco, CA
- Raleigh, NC
- Miami, FL
The U.S. metros with the highest share of external page views are mostly located in the southern half of the country. But that’s where their similarities end – differing demographic and economic characteristics influence people’s likelihood to look at homes outside their area.
San Antonio tops the list, with more than half (54 percent) of homes viewed on Zillow from within its boundaries directed at homes beyond its boundaries. This doesn’t mean San Antonio is particularly repulsive. Instead, there’s a simpler potential explanation: San Antonio, known as “Military City, USA,” is home to several large military bases from which soldiers are routinely transferred to and from, and from which military families may be looking to relocate following active military duty.
Austin isn’t too far from San Antonio, and its share of outbound home page views is almost as high, but Austin residents likely have different motivations for looking at homes in other places. The city features a large contingent of young, single professionals who may not have long-term location plans and instead are more apt to relocate for a new job.
Economic concerns may also shape the rate of external page views. In the San Francisco Bay Area, more than half of Zillow page views are directed toward other metros. This could be influenced in part by soaring housing costs in the Bay Area that may be forcing long-time residents to weigh their options on other, potentially less-expensive areas.
Given that popular metros like Austin and San Francisco have high rates of outbound views, it may be surprising that similar markets like Seattle, Portland and New York have low rates. But Seattle and Portland have only recently begun to experience explosive growth – people are pouring in, and natives are not eager to leave. And the gigantic New York metro is not just a place where people start a career or ride a wave of growth. Many cities and suburbs are encompassed within this metro, providing a vast and dense network that many people move within, but relatively few seek to leave entirely.
From metro-to-metro, it can also be useful to see where, exactly, potential longer-distance movers are looking to go. Is everyone just admiring the same beachfront estates, or are there more meaningful patterns within search behavior?
In general, when people conduct home searches and look at homes outside of their area, they typically look in adjacent metros or states. This is especially true in the southern states of Alabama, Tennessee, North Carolina and South Carolina. In the Midwest and Northeast, metros in Florida frequently appear as top destinations as well. This makes sense: Many people in the cold northern part of the country may either have retired family in Florida, or have plans to one day retire there themselves. Finally, some metros in more central locations have a wider geographic spread of search destinations. The best example of this is Denver, whose 10 most common external page view destinations are scattered across nine different states from coast to coast. The cause may lie in its residents’ origins; almost two-thirds of the people who live in Colorado were born in a different state.[4] So there is a good chance that those viewing homes from Denver are planning for an eventual homecoming, or just dreaming of one.
Outside, Looking In
But looking at the markets with higher shares of people looking at homes farther away only tells half the story. Equally telling is an examination of which markets receive the most external traffic per home listing.
After controlling for volume of listings, the average home near Palm Springs gets more page views from outsiders than homes in any other major market:
Top 10 markets with the most external views per home listing:
- Palm Springs, CA
- Sacramento, CA
- San Diego, CA
- Portland, OR
- San Francisco, CA
- Fresno, CA
- Jacksonville, FL
- Austin, TX
- Seattle, WA
- Denver, CO
One reason California markets may dominate the list could be because people are most likely to look at homes in markets near them. Given that California has by far the largest population of any state, homes in California markets tend to get more external page views per listing – even if those “external” viewers are located in other large California markets. Additionally, the geographic size of each market matters. For instance, the Palm Springs market is relatively small, and borders the highly populated, multi-county Los Angeles market. Essentially, there are a lot of people living near, but not in, Palm Springs who are likely to shop for homes there.
So why doesn’t the Philadelphia market, for example, have a lot of views per listing? It borders the gigantic New York metropolis, after all. The difference in the Northeast is that there are many highly-populated markets distributed throughout a relatively small geographic area. So people in New York are not only looking at homes in Philadelphia, but also in other large nearby markets including Albany, Hartford and Boston.
In general, this research suggests that a given market is most popular among people from nearby markets – with some notable exceptions. Florida markets including West Palm Beach, Orlando, Tampa and Miami are popular not only for searchers from Florida, but also from the Northeastern part of the country, likely because Florida is a common retirement destination for people in the Northeast. Additionally, markets including Portland, San Francisco, Austin, Seattle and Denver are all likely popular destinations for job-seeking young adults looking at homes from all areas of the country who have yet to settle down.
Somewhere in Between
Finally, there are a number of markets that don’t appear on either list: They neither send lots of viewers away, nor receive many views from afar. Attempting to classify all 50 markets analyzed, we sorted each metro into four rough buckets:
- Markets where many current residents may want out, and many outsiders want to move into – these markets feature both a lot of incoming and a lot of outgoing views.
- Markets in which current residents seemingly aren’t interested in moving far away, and that get a lot of page views from faraway areas. These markets get lots of incoming views and comparatively few outgoing ones.
- Markets where current residents often look at faraway homes, but that don’t attract a lot of outside attention – ie, few incoming views, and many outgoing.
- Markets where current residents seemingly are uninterested in faraway homes, and outsiders aren’t interested in local homes, characterized by few incoming and few outgoing views.
But the data can offer insight into the motivations of millions of present and future home buyers across the country. The promise of success in hot job markets does attract people to places like San Francisco, but affordability may be a barrier to staying there long term. Booming Portland and Seattle markets are both highly desirable among outsiders and places where current residents don’t seem to want to leave. Finally, many residents living in New Orleans, Miami and Detroit are looking at homes in other places for a variety of potential reasons ranging from urban decline (Detroit) to affordability concerns (Miami) and the potential impacts of climate change (New Orleans).
[1] http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2008/12/17/who-moves-who-stays-put-wheres-home/
[2] http://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2011/demo/p20-565.pdf
[3] Here, “users” refers to users who live in the 50 largest metros, which make up the bulk of Zillow users. Throughout this analysis, “metropolitan area” is defined as the Designated Market Area (DMA) in which a home or Zillow user is located.
[4] http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2011/04/American-Mobility-Report-updated-12-29-08.pdf