San Francisco, Los Angeles Top List of Cities Homebuyers Looked to Leave in 2022: Report

Traffic backs up at the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge toll plaza on Aug. 24, 2022. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

San Francisco and Los Angeles were the two top cities people were looking to leave at the end of 2022, according to Redfin, a national real estate company.

About 50,000 people on the company’s website searched to leave those two cities in the last three months of the year, it reported on Jan. 23.

San Diego was the most popular destination for Los Angeles residents looking to relocate. The median sale price there is $785,000, compared to Los Angeles, where it was about $918,000 in December 2022, according to Redfin.

Multiple homes with solar panels are shown in Scripps Ranch, San Diego, Calif., on Oct. 5, 2016. Mike Blake/Reuters

Las Vegas was the second-most searched for location by Los Angeles residents, followed by Phoenix, Arizona; San Jose; Seattle; Dallas, Texas; Bakersfield; Portland, Oregon; and Houston, according to Redfin.

Nationwide, a quarter of all homebuyers searched to move to a different city between October and December 2022 as Americans sought less-expensive areas amid an ongoing housing affordability crunch, Redfin reported. That was up from 22 percent in 2021 and 18 percent before the pandemic.

California was one of the top five states or districts homebuyers looked to leave, followed by New York, the District of Columbia, Massachusetts, and Illinois.

“The people who are buying homes are relocating at an unprecedented rate because elevated mortgage rates, still-high home prices and economic uncertainty are driving many of them—especially remote workers—to more affordable areas,” Redfin reported.

The top five states prospective homebuyers searched were Florida, Texas, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Arizona.

Sacramento, however, bucked the trend and was the most searched for destination for homebuyers looking to relocate, followed by Las Vegas, Miami, Tampa, and Phoenix, Redfin said.

Most of the new residents who moved to Sacramento relocated from Chicago, Redfin noted.

The California state Capitol building in Sacramento, Calif., on April 18, 2022. John Fredricks/The Epoch Times

About 600,000 people have moved out of California since the pandemic, resulting in a net loss of residents for the once-booming state, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.

In 2022, California lost another 343,230 residents as they left for other states, the Census Bureau reported in December.

Texas recorded the largest gain in population last year welcoming about 470,700 new residents, increasing the state’s total population to just over 30 million.

Florida, meanwhile, was the fastest growing with an increase of 1.9 percent.