Data Analysis

Florida holds five of the ten most searched relocation destinations in the country, and drew more out-of-market house hunters than any other state in the second quarter of 2026, according to Redfin.

North Port ranked second nationally with a net inflow of 5,873 Redfin users, followed by Orlando at 5,742 and Miami at 5,239. Cape Coral and Tampa also made the top ten. The figures measure search activity, not completed moves.

Five of the ten most popular relocation destinations in the country are Florida metros, according to Redfin data for the second quarter of 2026 published September 24. North Port ranked second nationally with a net inflow of 5,873, Orlando third at 5,742 and Miami fourth at 5,239. Cape Coral ranked sixth at 4,776 and Tampa seventh at 4,260. Only Las Vegas, at 9,581, drew more search interest than any Florida metro. At the state level Redfin reports that Florida attracted more house hunters than Arizona, South Carolina and Tennessee combined.

What is actually being counted here?

This is the part most coverage of migration data skips, and it changes how much weight the numbers carry.

Redfin's measure is search behavior on its own website. In the report's own words, a Redfin.com user counts as a migrant if they viewed at least 20 for-sale homes in an origin-destination pair in the relevant month. Net inflow is the number of users looking to move into a metro minus the number looking to leave it.

Nobody in these figures has necessarily bought anything, listed anything, or moved. A net inflow of 5,873 for North Port means Redfin users searching into North Port from elsewhere exceeded Redfin users in North Port searching outward by that margin, over three months. It is a measure of where attention is pointed, and attention is an early indicator that sometimes converts and sometimes does not.

It is also a sample of one company's website traffic rather than a population count. Nothing here is a census measurement and this desk does not treat it as one.

Which Florida metros made the list, and which did not?

The five are North Port at second, Orlando at third, Miami at fourth, Cape Coral at sixth and Tampa at seventh. Together those five account for 25,890 of the 51,915 net inflow across the whole top ten, which is 49.9 percent. Half of the measured relocation interest in the country's ten hottest destinations points at Florida. That share is this desk's calculation from Redfin's published table.

Two of those ranks should be read loosely. Miami at fourth with 5,239 sits 12 ahead of Sacramento at fifth with 5,227, which on a quarterly sample of search sessions is not a meaningful separation. North Port at second and Orlando at third are 131 apart. Both pairs are close enough that the ordering could flip on noise, and this article states the ranks while saying plainly that they carry no precision.

Las Vegas is a different case. At 9,581 it leads second-place North Port by 3,708, or 1.63 times. That gap is not a near-tie and Redfin's description of Las Vegas as America's hottest destination is supported by its own table.

Jacksonville, Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach do not appear in the published top ten. The report does not give their values, so nothing can be said about where they ranked or which direction they moved. Their absence from a top-ten list is not evidence of decline. Local market conditions for those areas are tracked on their own pages at Florida Housing Intelligence.

How strong is the state-level claim?

Redfin's own sentence is that Florida drew in more house hunters than any other state in the second quarter, by far, and that it attracted more searchers than Arizona, South Carolina and Tennessee, the next-most popular destinations, combined.

That is Redfin's claim, and the report does not publish the underlying state-level values that would let this desk check it. The metro table is published, the state table is not. So the claim is reported here as Redfin's, attributed to them, and not independently verified. What the metro table does independently support is the narrower finding that five of the top ten destinations are Florida, which is checkable and checks out.

Redfin also reports that Los Angeles, New York and Seattle are losing more house hunters than anywhere else in the country. The report publishes no outflow figures alongside that sentence, so it too is carried as their statement.

Does search interest tell Florida sellers anything useful?

It tells them something real but narrow. Sustained inbound search interest is one of the few forward-looking signals available in housing, since a search precedes a showing which precedes an offer. Five Florida metros in the national top ten is a genuine signal about demand direction.

What it does not tell them is price. Search interest and price movement are different measurements and they have diverged in Florida before. Tampa appeared seventh on this list for the second quarter while separately posting a year-over-year home price decline in the July Case-Shiller data. Strong inbound interest and softening prices can coexist, particularly where inventory is rising faster than demand.

Current price and inventory conditions for the metros on this list are on the Miami and Tampa pages, and statewide trends are tracked on the Florida housing tracker.

Limitations

These figures measure Redfin.com search sessions, not home sales, not moves, and not population change. Every number in this article should be read as an interest measure. No part of it is a transaction count.

The sample is Redfin users only. Redfin does not publish what share of house hunters in any metro use its site, so the geographic coverage of the sample is unknown and may vary between metros in ways that affect the ranking.

Redfin's two descriptions of its own methodology differ slightly. The report says a user counts as a migrant after viewing at least 20 for-sale homes in an origin-destination pair in a month. Redfin's migration data center page says 20 or more for-sale or rental listings. This desk read both and reports the report's wording, since that is the document the figures come from, but the discrepancy is unresolved.

The state-level claim that Florida beat Arizona, South Carolina and Tennessee combined is Redfin's and is not checkable from the published metro table. It is attributed, not verified.

Redfin describes nine of the ten destinations as being in the Sun Belt, and the list it gives includes Spokane, Washington. That characterization is Redfin's own and this desk neither adopts nor corrects it.

The Florida share of top-ten net inflow, the 12-person gap between Miami and Sacramento, the 131 between North Port and Orlando, and the Las Vegas multiple are all this desk's arithmetic on Redfin's published table. Redfin printed none of them.

Figures were read twice from Redfin's report page, the second read asking only for a verbatim transcription of the table rows and the row count. Both reads returned identical values and confirmed the table has ten rows. Redfin's migration data center page was checked as a second surface and carries the methodology definition but not the quarterly values, so it could not serve as an independent confirmation of the table.

Sources

Redfin, Las Vegas and Florida Are America's Hottest Destinations For Relocating House Hunters, published September 24, 2026: https://www.redfin.com/news/migration-q2-2026/

Redfin, U.S. Migration Patterns data center: https://www.redfin.com/news/data-center/migration-patterns/

Redfin Real Estate News index: https://www.redfin.com/news/

Disclosure: Jon Brooks is a co-founder of Momentum Realty, a Florida real estate brokerage that owns and funds Florida Housing Intelligence. Momentum has a financial interest in Florida real estate transactions, including in markets named here. See our editorial standards.