Nearly 1 in 5 House Hunters Making Long-Distance Move

Seattle, WA, March 11, 2026--Just under one in five (18.8%) house hunters looked to move to a different part of the country in the fourth quarter, reports Redfin. That’s up slightly from 17.9% a year earlier and up from 15.9% about five years earlier.

This is from a Redfin analysis of Redfin.com homebuyers and renters searching outside their home metro area. A Redfin.com user counts as a migrant if they viewed at least 20 for-sale homes in an origin-destination pair in the relevant month. 

Migration from one part of the country to another ticked up in 2025 as mortgage rates eased and more homes came on the market. While home sales were still slow, more buyers and renters were able to relocate. Remote work also remains more common than it was before the pandemic, allowing more Americans to relocate for affordability or lifestyle reasons without changing jobs. 

“People are moving to Tennessee in droves–especially Nashville and its surrounding areas,” said Aaron Glicken, a Redfin Premier agent in Nashville, Tennessee. “Compared to the West Coast, where many of them are moving from, we have relatively low housing costs and lower taxes. A lot of the people moving here work remotely, while others take local tech, healthcare or music jobs. In one exclusive high-end neighborhood, more than half of the homeowners are from California. I had one listing where three neighboring homes were all bought by people moving in from California within the last 18 months.”

Glicken said that while most people relocating to the Nashville area come from California, there are also people moving in from Chicago, New York and Texas. 

In 2021, mortgage rates were hovering just under 3% for most of the year and pandemic-fueled remote work was common, driving many people to relocate. While it’s somewhat counterintuitive that a higher share of house hunters are relocating to a different metro now than back then–18.8% compared with 15.9%–Redfin economists say it’s largely due to the large size of the metros in this analysis. 

We use Combined Statistical Areas (CSAs), which are typically made up of several Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs). The San Jose-San Francisco CSA, for example, is made up of many surrounding MSAs, including Napa Valley, Santa Cruz and several other places. A remote worker who moved from the city of San Francisco to Napa Valley in 2021 wouldn’t have been considered a “relocator” because those two places are part of the same CSA. That type of move, from cities to suburbs and exurbs, was common during the pandemic.