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By Suzanne Blake
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A new report has revealed which cities are seeing the highest number of residents looking to move away, and it's bad news for some of the top metros in the country.
According to the new Realtor report, 58.9 percent of listing views from the top 100 metros went to homes listed in other metropolitan areas on average—up from 48.1 percent six years ago.
Specifically, the San Jose, Washington, D.C., and Seattle metros were losing traction with residents.
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Why It Matters
During the coronavirus pandemic, many Americans fled high-cost-of-living cities in favor of more affordable suburbs and smaller Southern cities.
In the years since, local housing markets have shifted considerably as people returned to large cities due to more in-person work or made the lower-cost suburbs and Southern cities their permanent homes.
What To Know
The top 10 cities that lost popularity among residents in the Realtor.com report were as follows:
- San Jose, CA
- Washington DC
- Seattle, WA
- Salt Lake City, UT
- Stockton, CA
- Durham, NC
- Chicago, IL
- Denver, CO
- Boston, MA
- New York, NY
This was based on the share of Realtor.com listing page views that went to places outside of the metropolitan area where residents already lived during the second quarter.
In San Jose, more than nine in 10 online home views were directed to areas outside the metro. Roughly 60 percent of views were to other parts of California, while nearly 35 percent were directed at other states.
"Many residents in cities like San Jose, Seattle, and Boston have sought other options outside of their once-home because of rising costs and more remote work opportunities that could allow them to take high-income positions with them to less expensive locations," Alex Beene, a financial literacy instructor for the University of Tennessee at Martin, told Newsweek. "Still, rising costs may not be a problem if job opportunities, particularly high-income ones, are plentiful."
Home shoppers from the West were the group most likely to search for out-of-metro homes, at 65.1 percent.
But the Northeast was not far behind. Over the past six years, the share of out-of-market home searching surged most in the Northeast, rising from 45.4 percent in the second quarter of 2019 to 58.8 percent in the second quarter of 2025.
The South saw the second-largest increase, rising from 46.8 percent to 58 percent of the share of shoppers looking elsewhere over the past year.
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What People Are Saying
Nationwide title and escrow expert Alan Chang told Newsweek: "It is not a surprise to see that major metros across the country see less local buyers. Home affordability has been challenging for the last five years. With normalized mortgage interest rates, the only budget-friendly home purchase option for a majority of the population is to seek lower cost areas to migrate to, assuming their income source can support that move."
Kevin Thompson, the CEO of 9i Capital Group and the host of the 9innings podcast, told Newsweek: "Remote work gave people flexibility, and affordability forced their hand. When your income gets eaten up by housing in major metros, you start looking elsewhere, places where you can keep more of what you earn and still have a decent quality of life."
What Happens Next
Thompson said the housing market is still holding on strong, largely as interest rates remain sticky in the high 6 percent range.
"A lot of homeowners are locked into low long-term mortgage rates and have little incentive to sell," Thompson said. "People aren't moving, which means inventory stays tight and new supply continues to lag behind demand."
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