About three months ago, the data geniuses at Trulia kick started a never before seen housing report that starts with where people live today and where they want to live tomorrow. We dubbed it the “Metro Movers Report” because it’s a quick-and-dirty analysis of house hunting activity between people living in one metro area and homes located in another.
Well, we’re going to revisit this study today (specifically looking at all the home searches on Trulia.com that happened in the last three months of 2011) and give you the inside scoop on where today’s house hunters are headed tomorrow.
Where’s Everyone Going?
We found that more than 1 in 3 home searches on Trulia.com cross state lines. So if that tells you anything, there’s a notable chunk of people looking to move really far away. Meanwhile, everyone else wants to stay somewhat close to where they live now.
To illustrate what we mean, we built a really cool map that shows you from where people are looking to move in and move out. Using San Francisco as an example, here’s how this maps works.
When you click on San Francisco and on the “Inbound Search” button at the top, San Francisco becomes highlighted in black and the top 10 metros with the most home searches to San Francisco are highlighted in blue. If one of the blue circles is abnormally big (relative to all the other blue circles), that just means there are many more home searches heading into SF from that metro than from others.
As you can see from the map pasted below, San Francisco is quite a draw to a whole slew of house hunters across America, namely from Los Angeles, New York, Washington DC, Chicago, Phoenix and Houston.
Meanwhile, if you were to click on New York and on the “Outbound Search” button at the top, you’ll see that New Yorkers looking to get out of New York and its surrounding suburbs prefer to head to Los Angeles, Atlanta, Miami or West Palm Beach.
Haven’t You Heard, Florida Is The Place To Be
Call us crazy, but there sure has been a lot of buzz about the Sunshine state and housing. Must have had something to do with the latest round of votes between the last two men standing in the race to find a Republican presidential candidate.
Well, it’s not just the Grand Old Party (GOP) that’s interested in Florida. Turns out, a LOT of house hunters have a quite the love affair with the bargain bin homes for sale throughout the state — especially if they live in the Midwest and Northeast. Believe it or not, one-third of all the home searches in Miami on Trulia.com are made by people living far, far away (think 500+ miles away). See for yourself.
But here’s an interesting factoid. Of the top 10 metro areas where there are more homes searches by out-of-towners looking to move in than home searches by locals looking to get out of dodge, 7 are in Florida. That’s right, there are more people looking to move to America’s retirement capital than leave. We kid you not.
| Where Demand Among Online House Hunters Is Strongest | ||
| # | U.S. Metropolitan Area | # of Inbound Searches Per Outbound Search |
| 1 | Palm Bay-Melbourne-Titusville, FL | 8.80 |
| 2 | Lakeland-Winter Haven, FL | 7.60 |
| 3 | North Port-Bradenton-Sarasota, FL | 6.62 |
| 4 | Cape Coral-Fort Myers, FL | 2.59 |
| 5 | Tulsa, OK | 2.48 |
| 6 | West Palm Beach-Boca Raton-Boynton Beach, FL | 2.46 |
| 7 | Fort Lauderdale-Pompano Beach-Deerfield Beach, FL | 2.44 |
| 8 | Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, CA | 2.43 |
| 9 | Charleston-North Charleston-Summerville, SC | 2.40 |
| 10 | Orlando-Kissimmee-Sanford, FL | 2.30 |
NOTE: The inbound-to-outbound ratio for a metro area divides the number of incoming property searches by out-of-towners by the number of outgoing property searches by locals looking to leave. A ratio of 2 means that there are twice as many home searches by people looking to move in than leave.
To check out all the cool trends that we uncovered this time around, click through the slideshow below.
To learn more, here’s the full press release.
