Nearly one in five Redfin users shopped outside their home metro in late 2025
Remote work, stubborn affordability pressures and a slow thaw in mortgage rates continued to redraw the United States housing map in late 2025, with long-distance moves edging higher even as overall sales stayed muted.
In the fourth quarter, 18.8% of Redfin.com users searched for homes in a different metro, up from 17.9% a year earlier and 15.9% about five years ago, according to a new Redfin analysis.
That migration measure, based on users viewing at least 20 listings in an origin–destination pair, underscores how mobility held up despite elevated borrowing costs and tight inventory.
Remote workers kept crossing state lines
The real estate giant found that interstate moves ticked up as mortgage rates eased from their peaks and more homes came on the market, giving sidelined buyers and renters slightly more room to act.
Remote work remained more common than before the pandemic, allowing borrowers to relocate for “affordability or lifestyle reasons without changing jobs,” the report said.
That dynamic was evident in Tennessee. “People are moving to Tennessee in droves–especially Nashville and its surrounding areas,” said Aaron Glicken, a Redfin Premier agent in Nashville, Tenn.
“Compared to the West Coast, where many of them are moving from, we have relatively low housing costs and lower taxes.”
Glicken said many new arrivals worked remotely, while others filled local tech, healthcare or music roles.
Florida still led, but new hotspots emerged
At the metro level, Sacramento and Las Vegas posted the largest net inflows of Redfin.com searchers in the quarter, followed by four Florida markets – Cape Coral, North Port, Miami and Orlando.
All 10 top destinations, including Spokane, Boise, Myrtle Beach and San Antonio, were relatively affordable compared with the expensive coastal hubs people were most likely to leave.
Los Angeles and New York recorded the biggest net outflows, followed by the San Jose–San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle and Chicago.
Redfin noted that outmigration from the Bay Area slowed sharply from 2021 and 2022 as return‑to‑office policies and a rebounding tech job market, especially in AI, kept more workers in place.
Implications for lenders and brokers
For mortgage professionals, buyers have been trading big‑city job hubs for cheaper metros and rural communities, often armed with remote‑work incomes.
Industry economists have warned that such flows risk exporting affordability problems to smaller markets even as they relieve some pressure in legacy coastal centers.
For lenders, purchase demand might have remained subdued nationally, but the clients who did move were increasingly crossing state lines – and were looking for partners who understood both sides of the transaction.
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