2 California cities top list of places homebuyers want to leave: report

LOS ANGELES - People are looking to relocate from San Francisco and Los Angeles the most compared to any other city in the United States. 

A new report by Redfin found San Francisco topped the list of all cities in America where homebuyers are looking to relocate from. Los Angeles ranked second, followed by New York, Washington, D.C. and Boston. The rankings were determined by net outflow, a measure of how many more Redfin users looked to leave an area than move in.

Sacramento, Las Vegas and Miami were the most popular destinations for people looking to relocate, followed by San Diego and Tampa. Popularity is determined by net inflow, which is the number of people looking to move into a metro minus the number of people looking to leave.

According to the survey, majority of people relocating from Los Angeles are headed to Sin City. In Las Vegas, the typical home cost $410,000 in October, roughly half the price of the typical home in Los Angeles ($823,000).

Homebuyers leaving San Francisco are relocating to Sacramento the most, where homes cost less than half what they do in the Bay Area.

The report found people are prioritizing affordability now more than ever as the U.S. housing market has cooled significantly during the second half of 2022 due to high mortgage rates, inflation and a stumbling economy.

The average 30-year-fixed mortgage rate was 6.9% in October, up 3.83 percentage points from 3.07% one year earlier—the largest year-over-year increase during any month since 1981.

Redfin's migration analysis was based on about two million Redfin.com users who viewed for-sale homes online across more than 100 metro areas from August 2022 to October 2022. To measure the share of homebuyers looking to relocate from one metro to another, Redfin calculated the portion of overall home searchers that are migrants.