Redfin Migration Report: Top Migration Destinations Include Nation's Most Active Metros for Residential Construction

For the First Time, Nashville Ranks among the Top 10 Migration Destinations, at #8

SEATTLE -- Twenty-two percent of Redfin.com users searched for homes outside their home metro in the third quarter of 2017, according to the latest Migration Report from Redfin, the next-generation real estate brokerage. The number of long-distance searchers was up slightly from 21 percent in the second quarter and 20 percent in the first quarter.

The analysis is based on a sample of more than one million Redfin.com users searching for homes across 75 metro areas from July through September. Redfin began systematically tracking homebuyer migration at the beginning of this year, so there is not enough historical data to determine if the current trends follow a seasonal pattern.

Nashville appeared among the top 10 migration destinations for the first time last quarter. Nearly a third of all users searching for homes in Nashville were searching from another metro the area, among which just over a quarter (25.6%) searched from New York.

"We help people from across the country search for homes in Nashville," said Redfin Nashville agent Phillip Bernier, who has recently worked with buyers relocating from Chicago, San Diego and San Francisco.

"The cost of living is low and there is plenty to do downtown, but at the same time there is still a lot of natural beauty. You can be on a horse, on a lake or on a trail within a five-minute drive from downtown. The city is growing quickly. We have a running joke that the new state bird is the crane. If you look at the Nashville skyline, you can see 10 to 12 cranes at any given time."

Another new trend revealed in Redfin's third quarter migration analysis was that many of the cities experiencing a high net inflow of homebuyers were also places with higher than average rates of residential construction activity per capita.

Conversely, metros experiencing net outflow tended to have lower than average rates of new construction. According to a Redfin analysis of new construction data, nationally, there were 10.7 new residential housing units permitted to be built per 10,000 residents in September 2017.

Seven of the 10 metros with the highest net inflow had more permitted units than the national average. Nashville was also among the metros with the highest rates of new permit activity at 27 permitted new residential units per 10,000 residents. The metro areas poised to build the most new homes in the coming months are Houston, TX (10,000), Dallas, TX (9,400), Phoenix, AZ (7,800), and Atlanta, GA (7,700).

The third quarter also saw the continuation of several trends that dominated migration patterns in the first half of the year, including:

• Affordable, mid-tier metros like Sacramento, Phoenix and Atlanta drew prospective homebuyers from expensive coastal cities;
• The South and Sunbelt continued to see more incoming than outgoing searches; and
• The Rust Belt cities of Detroit, Dayton and Milwaukee experienced a net outflow of user searches.

*Combined statistical areas with at least 500 users in Q3 2017
†Among the one million users sampled for this analysis only

*Combined statistical areas with at least 500 users in Q3 2017
†Among the one million users sampled for this analysis only

To read the full report, complete with an interactive data map of metro-to-metro migration trends and full methodology, please click here.

About Redfin

Redfin is the next-generation real estate brokerage, combining its own full-service agents with modern technology to redefine real estate in the consumer's favor. Founded by software engineers, Redfin has the country's #1 brokerage website and offers a host of online tools to consumers, including the Redfin Estimate, the automated home-value estimate with the industry's lowest published error rate for listed homes. Homebuyers and sellers enjoy a full-service, technology-powered experience from Redfin real estate agents, while saving thousands in commissions. Redfin serves more than 80 major metro areas across the U.S. The company has closed more than $50 billion in home sales.