According to Trulia’s “Metro Movers Report” when people search long-distance for a new home their motivation for the move is warmer weather, not a job. Wow, I can relate to that….. In fact, according to the report, most long distance house hunters are looking in markets with higher unemployment and slower job growth than where they currently live. For example 3 times as many people in Minneaplolis – St Paul (with 6.2 percent unemployment) are looking for homes in Phoenix (where unemployment is 8.5) than vice versa.
Top Home Searches Are Between Neighboring Markets
Among all domestic home searches on Trulia, more than half (56 percent) are to another metro area — 36 percent of which are between neighboring metros, including all of the top ten searches. The most frequent cross-metro search is from Los Angeles to its inland neighbor, Riverside-San Bernardino, followed by New York to Long Island.
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Top 10 Home Searches
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# Origin Metro Destination Metro
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1 Los Angeles, CA Riverside-San Bernardino, CA
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2 New York, NY-NJ Long Island, NY
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3 Orange County, CA Los Angeles, CA
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4 Dallas, TX Fort Worth, TX
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5 Los Angeles, CA Orange County, CA
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6 Detroit, MI Warren-Troy-Farmington Hills, MI
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7 New York, NY-NJ Newark, NJ-PA
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8 Newark, NJ-PA New York, NY-NJ
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9 Warren-Troy-Farmington Hills, MI Detroit, MI
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10 Washington, DC-VA-MD-WV Bethesda-Rockville-Frederick, MD
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Short-Distance Home Searchers Want More Space
House hunters searching within 100 miles are twice as likely to look at more suburban or smaller markets, where typical neighborhoods consist of single-family homes with yards, than at more urban or larger markets, where homes are smaller and more likely to be apartments or condos (measured by density). Seven of the top ten searches, shown above, are toward lower-density metros. Suburban and smaller-city markets tend to have had bigger price drops during the housing crash and lower-cost housing now. However, these places still attract more home searches even when they are just as expensive as nearby urban markets. More than twice as many searches are from crowded Los Angeles to suburban Ventura County than in the reverse direction, even th ough homes are similarly expensive and the housing bust was similarly severe; same with Boston and Cape Cod, and New York and Fairfield County CT.
Long-Distance House Hunters Seek Affordability and Warmer Winters
The top long-distance searches for homes more than 500 miles away are toward the South and West. Unlike short-distance searchers, long-distance searchers are mainly attracted to lower prices and bigger price drops, not just lower density. Long-distance house-hunters are 1.7 times more likely to look for homes in markets with bigger price drops in the bust, relative to where they live now, than in markets that held up better. Long-distance searchers also factor in weather: people are 1.8 times more likely to look for homes in markets with warmer winters than in markets with colder winters, relative to where they live now.
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