Buyers casting a wider net in search of their next home 

As affordability challenges continue sapping housing market demand, two new reports suggest those who are looking for their next home are looking farther afield to make the costs of homeownership work with their budget.

In separate reports released this week, Realtor.com economists took different angles in assessing where buyers are shopping: One looked at the amount of time potential buyers are searching online for outside-their-market listings while the other evaluated who is buying newly built homes.

Both reports signaled increased interest and activity from people seemingly open to leaving the metro areas where they currently live.

How affordability is impacting home searches: In the spring of 2026, 60.1% of online views of Realtor.com listings were for out-of-market homes, according to research by Jiayi Xu, a Realtor.com economist. That's up substantially from 48.2% in the year before the pandemic, when affordability challenges were less strenuous.

Home shoppers "showed strong loyalty" in 14 of the 100 largest U.S. metro areas, Xu wrote, adding that these areas tend to be more affordable than the national average.

In St. Louis, 59.8% of the area's shopping traffic originated locally and stayed within the metro, the report found, followed by Cleveland (57%), Memphis, Tennessee (54.8%) and Pittsburgh (54.7%). In each of these metros, the median home listing price was at least 29% lower than the national average, with Pittsburgh coming in at 40.9% lower.

Meanwhile, the highest-priced markets had the highest shares of home shoppers looking for homes further away. With a median listing price of nearly $1.4 million, San Jose, California, had 94.4% of local home shoppers looking for out-of-market homes. Washington, D.C., had the second largest share at 85.9%, followed by Seattle (83.8%).

The report also found that formerly affordable markets like Salt Lake City, Denver and Durham, North Carolina, have started to see priced-out locals who are increasingly searching for homes in nearby markets (including Ogden, Utah, Colorado Springs, Colorado, and Raleigh, North Carolina).

Affordability "retains shoppers when present, pulls them in from pricier markets and pushes them out once it's gone," Xu wrote.

Leaning toward new builds: Demand for new homes is stronger than demand for existing homes among out-of-market buyers, according to research by Realtor.com Senior Economist Joel Berner. The South, a region that tends to have lower home prices and is more likely to see home listings undergo price cuts, has the biggest pull for these buyers, Berner's report found.

In a list dominated by the South, Lakeland, Florida had the highest out-of-metro share of views at 83.1%, followed by the Florida communities of Cape Coral (82.4%), Port St. Lucie (80.9%) and North Port (80.5%). The only metro outside Florida to land on the top five was Durham, North Carolina, at 80.2%.