Out-of-Market Buyers Drive Home Purchases in US Top 100 Metros: Report

Out-of-market buyers dominated residential home purchases—especially in areas where data-center campuses and artificial intelligence (AI) jobs are flourishing—in the nation’s largest metropolitan markets in the final quarter of 2025, according to a new report from online real estate listing service Realtor.com.

According to the cross-market demand report released on Feb. 26, out-of-market buyers accounted for the majority of home purchases in 87 percent of the country’s 100 biggest metropolitan markets. Just less than two-thirds of all online traffic viewing home listings came from out-of-market shoppers, up sharply from 48 percent in the same quarter in 2019, an indicator that the residential housing market is experiencing a fundamental shift in buyer demand, Realtor.com economist Jiayi Xu noted.

“This pattern could be largely driven by the lock-in effect, where existing homeowners—particularly in higher-priced markets—are less likely to move due to elevated mortgage rates and limited available inventory, concentrating transactions among out-of-metro buyers,” Xu said.

Demand from out-of-market buyers was particularly strong in San Francisco; Philadelphia; Pittsburgh; Omaha, Nebraska; and Detroit. Each region has seen surges in jobs related to artificial intelligence and data center expansion, according to Xu.

Mark Spiegel, senior policy adviser in the economic research department of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, said in a Feb. 26 analysis that AI job postings in 2025 accounted for 6.5 percent of hiring efforts across the four knowledge-intensive industries involving information, finance, advanced manufacturing, and technical service. The national average of job postings for other sectors of the economy was 1.2 percent, according to Spiegel.

“The rapid growth in AI-related job postings suggests an increased implementation of AI in the production and distribution of goods and services throughout the economy,” he said.

Downtown San Francisco is home to AI companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI, while the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has become a hotspot for data-center development. Last summer, PowerHouse Data Centers and Pennsylvania Data Center partners, for example, announced a $15 billion joint venture to build three hyperscale AI data-center campuses in central Pennsylvania. Amazon stated in June 2025 that it would deploy at least $20 billion across the state.

Out-of-market homebuying purchases in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh reflect the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s burgeoning data-center industry, Realtor.com noted. Non-local buyers accounted for 55 percent of home purchases in Pittsburgh and 53 percent in Philadelphia, up sharply from 30.5 percent and 28 percent six years earlier.

Non-local demand in the fourth quarter of 2025 was highest in coastal regions of the nation’s Sun Belt because of lower housing costs and lifestyle choices, according to Realtor.com. The Florida cities of Cape Coral, Fort Myers, Lakeland, Winterhaven, North Port, and Bradenton, along with Durham, North Carolina, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, all had about 80 percent of traffic coming from out-of-market homebuyers.

New York City had the lowest number of non-local buyers because of its high housing costs. The median sale price across New York City was just below $745,000 at the end of December 2025, according to real estate listing site Zillow.