More Than 60% of Buyers Are Searching Outside Their Local Market

Cross-market home searches crossed the 60% threshold this spring across the 100 largest U.S. metros — meaning the majority of active buyers in most cities are already looking somewhere else. That figure stood at roughly 48% in 2019, according to Realtor.com's economic research team. The gap is not a rounding error. It's a structural shift in how Americans shop for homes, and it has direct consequences for sellers in both expensive and mid-tier markets.

The Numbers Behind the Migration Wave

The West led all regions in outbound search traffic during the second quarter of 2026, with more than 65% of shopping activity pointing outside local markets. The South came in at 59.8%, the Northeast at 58.3%, and even the Midwest — long regarded as the affordable anchor of the country — hit 56.1%. Every region crossed the majority threshold. Buyers are not just dreaming about leaving expensive cities; they are actively searching listings in other metros at a rate that would have been unusual just seven years ago.

San Jose, California sits at the extreme end of this trend. More than 94% of San Jose-based shoppers searched outside their metro in the second quarter. That tracks with the market's fundamentals: the median asking price there exceeded $1.39 million this spring, placing it 225.5% above the national average. Even buyers with strong local incomes are doing the math and looking elsewhere.

The pattern repeats at lower price points. Washington, D.C. shoppers searched outside their market at an 86% rate, with many targeting Baltimore, where the median listing price runs roughly 35% lower than D.C.'s $588,332 median. Seattle buyers, searching at nearly 84% out-of-market, gravitated toward Portland, where prices ran about 24% below Seattle's $779,827 median. Los Angeles buyers — more than 70% searching outside the metro — focused heavily on Riverside, California, where the cost per square foot dropped from $641 to $341 compared with what they viewed locally.

Mid-Tier Markets Are Now Producing Their Own Priced-Out Buyers

What makes the current dynamic more complex than a simple expensive-city-to-cheap-city story is that the migration pressure has spread well into markets that once served as the affordable alternative. Salt Lake City, Denver, and Durham, North Carolina each saw more than 70% of local shoppers search outside their metro during the second quarter of 2026. These are not coastal luxury markets — they are metros that absorbed earlier waves of affordability refugees and have since crossed their own affordability thresholds.

Denver buyers moved their searches to Colorado Springs. Salt Lake City shoppers looked toward Ogden, Utah. Durham house hunters scanned listings in Raleigh. In each case, the target market carried prices roughly 5% to 15% lower than the origin city. The spreads are smaller than the San Jose-to-San Francisco gap, but the behavioral response is the same: when buyers feel squeezed, they scroll outward.

Realtor.com senior economist Jiayi Xu described the dynamic plainly: affordability pulls buyers in when it exists, retains them when it holds, and pushes them out once it erodes. That cycle is now playing out simultaneously in markets across income tiers.

What Affordability Flight Means If You're Pricing a Home to Sell

For sellers, the migration data cuts two ways — and understanding both sides matters more than any single price-per-square-foot figure.

If you are selling in a high-cost market, your local buyer pool is thinner than it looks on paper. More than 70% of active searchers in Los Angeles, Seattle, and Washington are browsing listings in other cities. The buyers still shopping locally tend to be anchored by jobs, family, or locked-in mortgage rates they cannot afford to give up. That means the pool skews toward necessity buyers, not aspirational ones — and necessity buyers negotiate harder. Pricing aggressively at list is a riskier strategy than it was three years ago. A home priced 5% over comparable sales is more likely to sit, because the buyer who might have stretched for it is already looking in Riverside or Portland.

If you are selling in a mid-tier market that has been absorbing inbound demand — think Colorado Springs, Ogden, Baltimore, or Raleigh — your position is stronger but not unconditional. You are capturing buyers fleeing pricier cities, and those buyers often have equity from their previous home to work with. That supports pricing. But as Xu's data shows, mid-tier markets that rise too fast begin generating their own outbound traffic. The window in which your market sits in the sweet spot is finite. Sellers who wait for further appreciation may find themselves on the wrong side of the affordability curve.

Timeline matters here too. Spring 2026 data shows that cross-market search activity is already elevated. Buyers who are searching outside their home market tend to take longer to transact — they are learning a new market, often without local agents they trust, and they may be waiting on a sale of their own home first. That extended decision cycle means sellers should expect longer days on market even in active receiving markets, and should not interpret early showing interest from out-of-town buyers as a quick close.

Jobs Pull as Hard as Prices Push

One finding from the Realtor.com data complicates the simple affordability narrative: employment matters as much as price. Birmingham, Alabama buyers are searching in Nashville, Tennessee at high rates — even though Nashville's median asking price runs roughly 80% above Birmingham's market. The draw is Nashville's job market, a 3.2% unemployment rate, and the absence of a state income tax. Buyers are not purely chasing cheap. They are chasing value, and value includes income opportunity.

For sellers, this means that markets with strong employment growth carry pricing power that pure affordability comparisons do not capture. If your metro has added jobs in sectors drawing national attention — technology, healthcare, logistics — your buyer pool may be broader and more financially stable than headline price data suggests. Conversely, a market with low prices but weak employment will attract bargain hunters, not committed long-term residents, and that affects how aggressively buyers compete.

If you are weighing when to list and want a concrete sense of what your home would fetch in the current market, running an instant offer comparison alongside a traditional listing analysis gives you a real data baseline before you commit to either path.