Searches for home listings outside of a homebuyer’s current metropolitan area surged in 2020 and 2021, with remote workers taking advantage of low mortgage rates to move to less expensive cites, and, while the trend has slowed, out-of-town searches are still a big part of house hunters.
According to Redfin, and based only on searches through its site and those of its agents, house hunters moving to a new area made up 25.1% of searches in the first quarter. That is a record, and compares to 18% before the pandemic.
The D.C. region is in the top 10 for homebuyers looking to leave, according to Redfin searches, ranking fourth. Net outflow, or the number of home searchers looking to leave minus the number of searches looking to move in, was 18,000 in the D.C. region in the first quarter. The portion of D.C. area residents searching elsewhere was 19% in the first quarter.
The list is dominated by notoriously expensive metros, topped by San Francisco and New York, where one-in-four searches were outbound last quarter. Los Angeles ranked third. Boston ranked fifth.
Click here to read the rest of the article written by Jeff Clabaugh over at WTOP
