Home Searchers: Who Is Coming and Going – And Who Is Staying Put?

• Almost half of Zillow page views originate from outside the metro area of the listing being viewed.
• In big cities, the share tends to be much smaller; in Chicago only 16% of page views come from outside the area.
• In many cities, the most-expensive neighborhoods close to downtown are most popular with outsiders.

The tens of millions of homeowners, buyers, sellers, renters and plain dreamers that visit home listings on Zillow each month offer a unique window into the aspirations and interests of the nation's home shoppers. Whether our users are in the thick of the hunt for a new home, or just looking before they leap at an opportunity to relocate, their traffic on our site provides a small signal into which directions moving truck traffic might be headed in the near future.

Using the rough locations of users' internet service provider and the ZIP codes of listings they're viewing, we can define two ways of looking at how attractive a given locale is:

• Outside appeal: The share of page views on listings in a given metro that originate from users located outside that metro area
• Stickiness: Among page views originating from users inside that metro area, this is the share that are browsing Zillow listings also inside that metro area.

Big Cities Get the Least Interest from Outsiders

In general, bigger cities see a smaller share of page views of their listings coming from outsiders. Chicago, America's "Second City" but third-largest metro area, landed in last place on this measure, with just 16% of page views coming from within the metro area. New York City, the nation's most populous MSA, isn't far behind: 17% of NYC home listings' page views originate from outsiders potentially looking to move in. In third, somewhat surprisingly, was the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area, where 24% of listings traffic originates from afar – much less than the market's relatively modest size would suggest.

At the other extreme, six of the 50 biggest metropolitan areas get a majority of their page views from non-residents: Las Vegas (60.7% of listing views come from outside the area), Jacksonville (56.2%), San Antonio (55.2%), Riverside-San Bernardino (54.7%), Raleigh (54.1%) and New Orleans (52.5%). This robust outside interest in these relatively affordable sunbelt cities reflects a national trend of migration out of some of the more-expensive and/or chillier parts of the country. Riverside is a special case, where page views from the massive adjacent Los Angeles MSA help to flood their home listings with "out of town" viewers, including some who might even live in Riverside but browse Zillow at their L.A. workplace.

America's "Stickiest" Cities Are All Over the Map

Another way of considering a city's appeal is to consider what share of its residents' search traffic is oriented closer to home, a metric we call "stickiness." St. Louis tops the charts by this measure, with 74% of web traffic originating nearby staying focused on home listings nearby. Other sticky cities include Detroit (69.1% of page views are from users within the MSA), Jacksonville (67.3%), Phoenix (66.7%) and Cleveland (66.4%). Unlike with the outside appeal metric, which shrinks inversely with population, the stickiness metric has no significant relationship to city size.

The least sticky market among the 50 largest is Nashville, where just 30% of local web traffic is directed at home listings nearby. Other less-sticky places include Salt Lake City (31.1%), San Jose (35.3%), Orlando (37.2%) and Charlotte (39%).

Putting it all together, those cities that rank highest for both stickiness and outside appeal include Jacksonville, St. Louis, San Antonio, Las Vegas and Richmond, Va.

A Closer Look at Outside Appeal

Looking within each metropolitan area reveals interesting stories about the parts of town that draw the most interest from newcomers or outsiders. Across all areas analyzed, a few common threads emerge: First, that the downtown of the central city is perennially appealing for outsiders to peruse. This could reflect interest in living close to jobs when first moving to a city, or it might just be the part of town that visitors most often encounter while traveling, so it's the part they look up first. In Seattle, for example, Zillow home listings in ZIP code 98104 – which encompasses much of the city's downtown business district and historic Pioneer Square – attract almost half their web traffic from out of town.

Also popular among out-of-town viewers are neighborhoods close to downtown and/or famous neighborhoods that may attract a lot more "window shopping" on Zillow rather than serious house hunters. For example, listings in the 90210 ZIP code and the neighboring 90077 in L.A.'s Westside collect a staggering 70% of their traffic from outside the Los Angeles area. These ZIP codes are probably better known as Beverly Hills and Bel Air.

Finally, ZIP codes literally outside the central MSA are also popular with outsiders: Those areas at the outer fringes of every metropolitan area often attract outsized outside interest, for the natural reason that they are quite nearly outside the bounds of the MSA itself. The geographic boundaries of commuting areas, home shopping areas and even MSAs and ZIP codes themselves do not line up neatly, so the definitions of "local" and "outsider" naturally get much fuzzier at the edges of metro areas.

Use the dropdown menu to see the patterns across your own metropolitan area below:

Where Exactly Are People Coming From?

Every city's listings data tells a different story of who is interested in moving in, or where residents are looking at moving to. Again using Seattle as an example, it appears there is some truth to Seattle locals' gripes about an influx of California transplants: The top outside origins for people looking at Seattle listings are L.A. and San Francisco, followed by nearby Portland, Ore. But other origins might be more surprising, including a steady flow from New York, Seattle's fourth-biggest originator, and enough people thinking of trading in sunny Phoenix for greener Pacific Northwest pastures to help put it fifth on the list of top 5 origination cities.

But before worrying about all that competition from the Golden State or elsewhere, Seattleites should maybe consider that there were about 34 times as many page views from within the Seattle metro area as there were from Los Angeles.

See your own city's top outside origins below:

Methodology

All page view events on Zillow listings (both for-sale and for-rent, and via both the Zillow desktop and mobile offerings) were tallied from three months across 2019, and aggregated by the ZIP code of the home listing and the city identified in web traffic analytics as the location of the user. Both locations of users and listings were then aggregated to the MSA level based on whether their centroid was located inside standard shapefiles for the MSA. In cases where users' locations did not fall inside an MSA boundary, they were assigned to the nearest one within 50 miles; if there was none within 50 miles, they were counted as non-metropolitan users.

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