Where Americans Are Moving: Buyer-Friendly Cities Outpace Renter Havens

Americans are more likely to search for moves into buyer-friendly cities than renter-friendly ones — especially into cities like Ocala (FL), Kissimmee (FL), and Greensboro (NC).

The most popular reason for moving in America? Housing.

Most often, it’s to upgrade to a bigger, newer home. Others move to finally buy instead of rent, or to find a more affordable place.

At moveBuddha, our goal is to make those moves easier. With so many moves driven by housing — we wanted to know: Which buyer- and renter-friendly cities are attracting the most movers right now?

Here’s how we found out: We ranked the 200 largest U.S. cities by comparing median home prices to annualized rent costs. Buyer-friendly cities are where it’s cheaper to buy a home than rent; renter-friendly cities are where buying a home costs far more than renting.

We then identified the top 25 cities in each group, scored and ranked them based on affordability and housing availability, and finally overlaid 2025 mover search data from our Moving Cost Calculator to determine where Americans are actually planning to move right now.

Key Takeaways

• • Buyer-friendly cities are growing. In 2025, movers are 11% more likely to head to the top 25 buyer-friendly cities, while the top 25 renter-friendly metros see nearly 30% fewer in-moves.
  • Move-to hotspots among the top 25 buyer-friendly cities are Ocala, FL (2.53 in-to-out ratio), Greensboro, NC (1.82), Columbia, SC (1.33), and Amarillo, TX (1.33). Of the top 25 renter-friendly cities, it’s Portland, OR (1.43), Frisco, TX (1.33), and Austin, TX (1.14).
  • The 3 buyer-friendliest cities are in Florida. #1 Pensacola, #2 Cape Coral, and #3 Ocala.
  • Renter-friendly ≠ cheap rent—buying is just far pricier. California dominates renter havens, home to 14 of the top 25.
  • The top two renter-friendly cities spots are in Texas — #1 Frisco (~29 years of rent to buy, 61% above average) and #2 Austin.

Buyer-Friendly Cities are More Desirable

Movers prefer cities with high buyer-friendliness, by our calculations. 

In 2025, movers are 11% more likely to head to the top 25 buyer-friendly cities, while the top 25 renter-friendly cities see nearly 30% fewer in-moves.

And it’s not just the top 25 — the 10 most buyer-friendly cities are even more attractive to Americans relocating in 2025, drawing 20% more in-moves than the national average

In other words, the more buyer-friendly a metro is, the more likely it is to be on the radar of movers.

Top-ranked buyer-friendly cities in Florida, like #1 Pensacola, FL, and #2 Cape Coral, FL, have above-average interest in in-moves compared to those heading out. And #3 Ocala, FL, with its sky-high 2.53 in-to-out ratio, gets more than double the interest from newcomers looking to move in compared to those interested in moving away. 

Just a handful of the top 25 renter-friendly cities have high in-to-out move ratios, indicating strong interest from movers in strong renter markets: Portland, OR; Frisco, TX; and Austin, TX.

#3 Montgomery, AL, which has the lowest home cost-to-annual income ratio among all top-25 buyers’ cities at just 2.65, also sees just 0.8 newcomers looking to move in for every resident hoping to exit. 

It’s proof that affordability doesn’t always lead to mover appeal. 

We filtered the top buyer-friendly cities by income, eliminating spots with <20% poverty, and found that the remaining cities that combine relative prosperity with affordability have an even greater pull for potential movers, and more opportunities for long-term stability and growth. 

The Most Buyer-Friendly Cities

The “buyer-friendliest” cities are those with the lowest price-to-rent ratios, where buying is relatively cheap compared to renting.

That pattern shows up most strongly in the South and the Midwest. Why? For one, there are lower home prices as a baseline. Even if rents are also modest, their range is less than that of home prices.

When cities with high poverty rates are removed, the image of what “buyer-friendly” really means comes into sharper focus: these hotspots for potential buyers offer a lifestyle, along with lower housing cost burdens, and tons of listings.

Which cities come out on top? 

Here are the top 25 friendliest cities for buyers.

Take #1 Pensacola, where the average home price costs $264,718, and a typical rent payment is $1,723. A resident will pay an annual rent of around $20,671. The price-to-rent ratio is 12.81, meaning that someone could buy the average home outright or pay 12.81 years of average rental expenses upfront for the same cost in Pensacola.

Compare that to Los Angeles, CA, where both rent and homes are notoriously high. The average renter there will pay $2,880 per month or $34,555 for the year to keep a roof over their head.

Rent in L.A. is almost 1.7X larger than in Pensacola.

But to buy a home, the L.A. renter will have to fork over $951,368. That’s 3.6X larger than in Pensacola. 

So, while rents in expensive coastal cities are higher than their Southern and Midwestern counterparts, home prices are even higher.

The overall winner for home buyers? It’s Texas, with a whopping 7 cities (far more than #3 Florida). 

Texas, after all, is large. It has an abundance of flat land to set the stage, and it adds easy zoning regulations and low construction costs, all of which contribute to higher housing inventory and lower costs. As a result, the average home in Texas’s 7 buyer-friendliest cities is 3.6X the average income in those metros. That’s far lower than the 5.61 average of the 200 cities we analyzed.

The Most Renter-Friendly Cities

Back in Los Angeles, the average home costs 11.84 times the average annual income. That’s a burden of an additional 8+ years of labor dedicated entirely to paying for housing for every resident.

It’s often better to rent in cities like this, where city and ocean views command tens of millions of dollars, but even average homes scrape the million-dollar mark.

But that’s not all to consider. We considered both affordability (the annual rent compared to the area’s income) and availability. 

Here are the top 25 renter-friendliest markets.

While coastal cities take up the lion’s share of the top 25, making them key locations to rent rather than buy, two Texan metros top them all.

In #1 Frisco, TX, it’d take renters about 29 years of average rental payments to purchase a typical home. As demand for homes skyrocketed in recent years, new arrivals with buying power brought their equity from more expensive coastal homes.

The result? Even though places like Frisco build plenty of homes, their costs have risen disproportionately compared to rents. Both Frisco and #2 Austin have lots of available homes (37 and 38 per 1K residents, respectively), but buying has become disproportionately expensive.

As a result, the gaps between home and rent costs have stretched. 

Even though Texas has gobbled up the #1 and #2 spots for renters, California reigns supreme when it comes to renting vs. buying. Fourteen of the top 25 cities are in the Golden State, including 5 cities in the Bay Area and 8 in Los Angeles (4 in L.A. County and 4 in Orange County). Even San Diego makes an appearance with 2 cities — upping Southern California’s tally to 10 of the top 25.

The decades-long mythology of Southern California dreamin’ has meant an influx of sun worshippers and celeb followers to an area where incomes haven’t been able to keep pace with home price growth. It’s also a region where oceans, mountains, and zoning restrictions limited growth. Combined with the state’s high construction costs, California has seen very little new housing, and costs for buyers have soared.

Today, California’s enormous market and high incomes favor renters. Apartment costs are high, but rent-to-income ratios indicate that average rents are reasonable, and supply is available, allowing renters to manage despite sticker shock.

Renter-friendly markets aren’t winning new residents overall, but the cities that do have favorable in-to-out migration ratios are Frisco, TX, Austin, TX, Seattle, WA, and Portland, OR.

Americans Are Migrating to Buyer’s Markets

Overall, Americans are gradually shifting from high-cost rental markets to more affordable, buyer-friendly markets.

But it’s interest from buyers over housing prices that makes for a buyer’s market in the first place; the balance of supply and demand stands to overturn that fortune as cities become more in-demand.

Hotspots like Ocala, FL (with an in-to-out move ratio of 2.53), Greensboro, NC (1.82), and Columbia, SC (1.33) are poised as the country’s current “boomtowns” where there’s every chance they’ll meet the same fate as Frisco or Austin. If housing costs rise faster than rents in these cities, in-migration will drive up home prices relative to rents. Ocala, with its small market and limited inventory, is at the biggest risk.

Ultimately, keeping inventory high as new residents pour in is a tall order. Bigger, build-friendly markets (like Austin) haven’t done it, but in the years to come, the current buyer-friendly boomtowns must find a way, or else they’ll become tomorrow’s renter cities.

Methodology

We looked at the top 200 largest cities in the U.S., analyzing the median home price and annual rental rates. 

From there, we created a ratio of home value to rental value. Higher ratios represent rental-friendly cities. The cost of buying is significantly higher compared to renting, and the disproportionate costs make buying more expensive. Lower ratios mean homes are relatively cheap compared to renting, and ownership costs line up more closely with rental fees.

We added factors such as:

• Affordability metrics, like average annual salary
• Availability (the number of listings in the city)
• Poverty filters: While they might be affordable, cities with over 20% poverty were filtered out to avoid clustering the most economically distressed cities into “friendly” categories

Finally, we added MoveBuddha data encompassing all searches from 2025, measured as an in-to-out move ratio. The number of searches for moves into a city divided by the number of moves headed out. A ratio greater than 1 indicates strong mover inbound interest or inflow, and a ratio less than 1 indicates outflow.