New York leads the searches
for Philadelphia area rentals

People looking for a rental in the Philadelphia region are increasingly not from the Philadelphia region. Zillow studied rental search traffic across 50 metropolitan areas, and as of July the largest out-of-town source for this area was New York. The Philadelphia Inquirer covered the analysis. The traffic runs the other way too: the Philadelphia region was the top out-of-town market feeding searches in the New York area.

The numbers behind that are lopsided in our favor. Slightly more than 7% of all views on Philadelphia area rental listings came from people in the New York metro. Going the other way, only 1.6% of views on New York rentals came from residents here, and New York is described as the market most driven by its own locals, with more than three in four views coming from inside it. Los Angeles and Chicago behave the same way, which Zillow attributes to the sheer size of those populations.

The broader figure is the one worth holding on to. Two in five views on a Philadelphia area rental came from outside the region, leaving roughly 61% with locals, and the out-of-town share grew by 0.6 percentage points from a year earlier. Nationally the biggest jumps in out-of-town interest went to Buffalo, Chicago and Houston, and in Raleigh, Hartford and New Orleans the out-of-town hunters now outnumber the locals.

Zillow's chief economist, Mischa Fisher, framed why a rental number matters to people who are not renting. He said renting is commonly how somebody tries out a new community before committing to it, and that a rising share of searches from outside a metro is what tells them a pipeline is forming there. A rental search is not a purchase, but it can be the step before one.

For an owner in South Jersey the read is straightforward, with one caution attached. The caution is that Zillow measured the Philadelphia metro area as a whole and published no South Jersey or county cut, so none of these percentages is a count of anything happening in Gloucester or Camden County. What the analysis does say is that the pool of people paying attention to housing in this region keeps widening past the people already in it, and what a specific house would bring still comes down to what has sold nearby.