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.

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.

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.

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 an early sign of more people headed there. A rental search is not a purchase, but it can be the step before one.

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.