A record share of home buyers are looking to relocate

A record share of homebuyers in this year's sleepy housing market are looking to relocate, according to a Redfin analysis.

The share of prospective movers browsing new metros on the real estate platform's website was 25.2% between February and April, it said. That eclipsed the 22.8% of users looking to move at the same time last year, when rates were still below 5%, and above the 19% of potential relocators before the pandemic began. 

Florida remains a top destination despite a tightening market, while residents of the nation's priciest coastal cities continue to search for some affordability, according to Redfin's analysis of the activity of over 2 million users.

"About half of the people buying homes here are from out of town, and some are able to pay cash," said Nicole Dege, a Redfin Premier agent in Orlando, in a press release. "Even though fewer people are coming in from out of town, there are also fewer homes for sale."

The migration boom isn't bucking larger market trends, with the total number of Redfin users looking at new cities dropping 6% from a year earlier, the platform's biggest drop on record. Rather, the relocators are making up a bigger share of activity. Earlier this month, mortgage applications were down 35% from the same time last year. 

In-metro searches declined 17% over the same February-to-April period, another Redfin record since it began recording the metric in 2018. Prospective buyers are also showing a proclivity to move thousands of miles across the country; only a few markets show voluminous flow to another in the same region, such as San Francisco to Sacramento, California. 

Phoenix and Miami top Redfin's ranking of top cities homebuyers are looking at, with interest largely from New York City and Seattle, Washington. Meanwhile, over a third of local Redfin users in pandemic hotspots like Denver and Minneapolis are looking to leave, with Chicago as a popular destination.