Where Do Americans Move to, Where Do They Stay, and Where Are They Coming From?

Ever get the feeling that you want to pick up and start over somewhere new where no one knows you? Try looking at San Antonio, Texas, or Raleigh, North Carolina, for your escape. Zillow analyzed the traffic on its site to determine where listings are getting the most traffic, and if the traffic is coming from outsiders or locals. The company found that big cities are getting less interest from outsiders, while sunbelt cities are attracting out-of-towners with their affordable homes and lower cost of living. Find out if your city made the list of the cities most desirable to those trying to get out of town. 

The tens of millions of homeowners, buyers, sellers, renters and plain dreamers that visit home listings on Zillow each month offer a unique window into the aspirations and interests of the nation’s home shoppers. Whether our users are in the thick of the hunt for a new home, or just looking before they leap at an opportunity to relocate, their traffic on our site provides a small signal into which directions moving truck traffic might be headed in the near future.

Using the rough locations of users’ internet service provider and the ZIP codes of listings they’re viewing, we can define two ways of looking at how attractive a given locale is:

• Outside appeal: The share of page views on listings in a given metro that originate from users located outside that metro area
• Stickiness: Among page views originating from users inside that metro area, this is the share that are browsing Zillow listings also inside that metro area.

Big Cities Get the Least Interest from Outsiders

In general, bigger cities see a smaller share of page views of their listings coming from outsiders. Chicago, America’s “Second City” but third-largest metro area, landed in last place on this measure, with just 16% of page views coming from within the metro area. New York City, the nation’s most populous MSA, isn’t far behind: 17% of NYC home listings’ page views originate from outsiders potentially looking to move in. In third, somewhat surprisingly, was the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area, where 24% of listings traffic originates from afar – much less than the market’s relatively modest size would suggest.

At the other extreme, six of the 50 biggest metropolitan areas get a majority of their page views from non-residents: Las Vegas (60.7% of listing views come from outside the area), Jacksonville (56.2%), San Antonio (55.2%), Riverside-San Bernardino (54.7%), Raleigh (54.1%) and New Orleans (52.5%). This robust outside interest in these relatively affordable sunbelt cities reflects a national trend of migration out of some of the more-expensive and/or chillier parts of the country. Riverside is a special case, where page views from the massive adjacent Los Angeles MSA help to flood their home listings with “out of town” viewers, including some who might even live in Riverside but browse Zillow at their L.A. workplace.

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