San Diegans with dreams of homeownership are thinking of trying their luck in Las Vegas.
A Redfin study released Wednesday said its search data showed San Diego was the No. 10 place where users of its site were looking to leave, along with other high-cost areas like San Francisco and New York.
Las Vegas was the top destination for San Diego home searchers from August to October.
The study is based on where people are searching for homes, not actual migration data, which lags by years, so it’s not an exact predictor. However, it does show a trend of people living in high-cost areas looking for more affordable options.
People who were looking to buy somewhere else mostly came from San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles. Top home destination searches on the website were for Sacramento, Las Vegas and Orlando.
Las Vegas had a median home price of $418,000 in mid-November, compared to $863,000 in the San Diego metropolitan area.
“Many of these metros have a few things in common: They’re more affordable than the most common origin of homebuyers moving in,” said the Redfin study.
Data was based on the searches of roughly 2 million users of Redfin.com. To be included in the study, a user had to look up at least 10 for-sale homes outside their metro area.
Locals might be fed up up with high prices, but there are still plenty of people daydreaming about living here. Last year, San Diego was one of the top searched destinations with the majority of shoppers coming from Los Angeles and Chicago.
The difference this year was more people were looking to leave America’s Finest City than there were those dreaming of getting a place out here. San Diego had one of the largest outflows — 2,100 users — which measured the number of home searches from the metro minus the number looking to move here.
Higher mortgage rates have slowed migration trends, Redfin said, as the price to own a home grows. It said the number of website users looking to move away from their metro area fell 7.9 percent in October, which was the second largest decrease since 2017. The biggest drop was in September.
