Buying a Home in a City You Have Not Moved To Yet: What the Distance Data Really Says
Buying a Home in a City You Have Not Moved To Yet
The median buyer moves 20 miles. The only distance table the National Association of Realtors publishes says something stranger — and it changes how you should think about a search you are running from four states away.
NAR’s 2025 report puts the median distance between the home bought and the home left at 20 miles, unchanged from the year before. But the one distance table broken into bands is bimodal: roughly 45% of those households moved 20 miles or less and 38% moved 101 miles or more, with only about 18% in the 21-to-100-mile middle. That table comes from the seller side of the survey, so read it as repeat-buyer households, not every buyer. The practical point: buying at distance is ordinary, the typical search still runs 10 weeks, and the trip you take is worth planning like research.
The median lands in a valley, not on a hump
The 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers surveyed 6,103 primary-residence buyers about purchases made from July 2024 through June 2025, with a margin of error of plus or minus 1.25%. Its headline distance figure is a median of 20 miles between the home purchased and the home moved from — flat year over year, down from the 50-mile peak in the 2022 report and above the 15 miles that held from 2018 through 2021.
A median is a midpoint, not a portrait. The only place NAR prints the full distribution in bands is Exhibit 6-18, on the seller side of the survey. It does not look like a bell curve with a bump at 20 miles. It looks like two separate populations.
Distance between the home purchased and the home sold, all sellers. Source: NAR 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, Exhibit 6-18.
Add the bands up. About 45% of these households moved 20 miles or less. About 38% moved 101 miles or more, and 23% moved 501 miles or more. The entire 21-to-100-mile middle — the range a median of 20 or 30 miles appears to describe — holds only about 18%. The median here is 30 miles, and it sits in the trough between two clusters. Almost nobody moves a median distance; people either stay in the metro or leave it.
Three things that table does not say
It is not a buyer table. Exhibit 6-18 sits in the seller chapter and measures the gap between the home sold and the home bought, so it describes households that already owned. NAR publishes no equivalent band table for all buyers, which is why it is labelled here.
It is not cross-tabulated with behavior. NAR does not publish distance against weeks searched, or against anything about how buyers see homes. Nothing here shows that moving 900 miles changes how a search runs; stacking two separate exhibits into a cause would be an invention.
It is not a forecast, either. The 50-mile median in the 2022 report has already unwound, and one flat year is not a trend line.
A record share of house hunters, not a record number of them
The live-search data points the same way. Redfin reported in “19% of House Hunters Are Looking to Relocate” (June 29, 2026) that 19.1% of U.S. house hunters were looking to move to another part of the country in the first quarter of 2026, up from 18.9% a year earlier and the highest share in records going back to 2021. The measure counts Redfin.com users in the top 100 metros who searched outside their home metro and viewed at least 20 for-sale homes in a month — search intent, not completed moves.
Redfin’s own caveat is the useful part: a record share is not a record number. Homebuying overall is sluggish, so the count of people relocating is probably lower than in 2021 and 2022. Outbound flows have cooled too — New York’s net outflow of searchers fell to roughly 28,000 in Q1 2026 from about 46,000 in 2022, the Bay Area’s to roughly 23,000 from about 74,000.
Net inflow of Redfin.com searchers, Q1 2026. Source: Redfin, published June 29, 2026; top 100 metros, search activity rather than completed moves.
Ten weeks, and the part of a house that does not fit through a screen
Typical length of a home search, steady year over year. NAR does not break it out by distance.
Found the home they bought on the internet; 27% through an agent, 9% via a friend, relative or neighbor.
Said finding the right property was the most difficult step of the buying process.
Ask buyers which website features are very useful and the ranking is blunt. Photos 81%, detailed property information 77%, floor plans 57%, agent contact information 44%, virtual tours 38%, recently-sold information 34%, neighborhood information 34%. Read that as stated opinion, not a measure of what those features get right. Among information sources overall, an agent leads at 77% very useful, ahead of mobile or tablet search (60%), online video sites (58%), open houses (43%), home builders (41%), relocation companies (33%) and yard signs (28%).
Two footnotes for buying at distance. 97% of buyers used a relocation company rarely or not at all; only 5% named a job relocation as their primary reason for buying, against 16% moving closer to family or friends. And the two features at the bottom of that usefulness list, neighborhood and recently-sold information, are the two an out-of-area buyer needs most.
How to plan a trip you can only take once
Photos and detailed property information are what buyers rate most useful, and they are good enough to cut a long list to a short one. Floor plans, at 57%, beat another hallway photo.
List what a listing cannot answer: the commute at the hour you drive it, street noise, cell signal, light in the rooms you use most, and how the block sounds on a weekday evening.
Open houses are rated very useful by 43% of buyers and cost only time. Build the itinerary around the ones already scheduled, grouped by neighborhood rather than by appointment order; traffic is what eats a two-day trip.
Neighborhood information ties for last on the usefulness list at 34%, which tells you where the gap is. Walking two or three candidate areas at different hours is what you cannot redo from another state.
The typical search runs 10 weeks, and one visit rarely closes it. Decide in advance what a second trip would be for, and what you will do if the right listing appears the week after you fly home.
Frequently asked questions
How far does the typical homebuyer actually move?
The median distance between the home purchased and the home moved from was 20 miles in the 2025 NAR report, the same as the year before. But the only distance distribution NAR publishes in bands is bimodal, so most households in it sit well inside or well outside 20 miles.
Is a record share of buyers relocating right now?
A record share, not a record number. Redfin found 19.1 percent of house hunters were searching outside their home metro in the first quarter of 2026, the highest share in records going back to 2021. Redfin also notes that homebuying overall is sluggish, so the count of relocators is likely lower than in 2021 and 2022.
How long should I expect a search to take if I am buying from out of town?
NAR puts the typical search at 10 weeks, steady year over year, and it does not break that figure out by distance. Treat 10 weeks as a planning baseline rather than a promise. It also reports that 56 percent of buyers called finding the right property the most difficult step.
What can I trust from listing photos, and what still needs an in-person visit?
Buyers rate photos and detailed property information as the most useful website features, at 81 percent and 77 percent very useful. Floor plans come in at 57 percent and virtual tours at 38 percent. Those are opinions about usefulness rather than measurements of accuracy, and none of them capture street noise, cell signal, or the commute at the hour you actually drive it.
Should I hire a relocation company?
Most buyers do not. In the 2025 NAR report, 97 percent of buyers said they used a relocation company rarely or not at all, and relocation companies were rated very useful by 33 percent, near the bottom of the information sources buyers rated. Only 5 percent of buyers named a job relocation as their primary reason for buying.
One last piece of housekeeping: ask early how each listing on your short list can be seen — an agent showing, an open house, or an on-demand option like the one Tourzy is building — so it is not a surprise the week a house you want comes up.
Sources: National Association of Realtors, 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers (Exhibits 1-21, 3-3 through 3-8, 6-18) and NAR’s top 10 takeaways; Redfin, “19% of House Hunters Are Looking to Relocate”, June 29, 2026. The 45%, 38%, 23% and 18% figures are sums of the published Exhibit 6-18 bands, subject to rounding; that exhibit covers sellers.
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