‘It’s really hard for locals to compete’: Out-of-towners have one major advantage over locals in America’s hottest housing markets

Out-of-towners have cash to spare when shopping for homes — at least compared with local families competing for those same properties.

That’s the takeaway from a new analysis conducted by real-estate brokerage Redfin RDFN, -3.45%, which looked at the gap between the budgets for people relocating to various markets across the country and the budgets that locals can spend to buy a home. Across the 49 cities Redfin analyzed, in all but seven out-of-town buyers had higher budgets.

Redfin limited its analysis to cities where there were at least 3,000 saved home searches on the company’s website from buyers located within the metro area and 3,000 from folks outside of the city in question. Redfin then determined the average maximum list-price filters each cohort of buyers saved before comparing them.

The largest gap was noted in Nashville, where the average budget for migrating buyers was 28.5% higher than the average budget for people who already resided in the city. Philadelphia was closed behind with a 28.4% gap, followed by New York (26.5%), Atlanta (26.1%) and Miami (25.1%).