Buffalo and Houston are the next big landing spots for priced-out renters, Zillow finds

For-sale home prices refuse to budge, and it’s pushing an army of would-be buyers back into the rental market — a trend quietly reshaping which cities are about to boom.New data from Zillow shows renters nationwide are increasingly hunting for apartments outside their own metro areas, and the cities pulling in the biggest crowds of outsiders are Buffalo, Chicago and Houston, followed by New Orleans and Dallas. In markets like Salt Lake City, Raleigh, Hartford and Nashville, out-of-towners searching for rentals now outnumber locals altogether, a sign that the migration wave that hit those cities has already matured into full-blown demand.That matters more than it seems.Rental searches tend to predict where home sales heat up next, since renting is often the test run before a purchase.“Renting is often how people try out a new community before committing.

When we see a market with a growing share of rental searches coming from outside the metro, that tips us off to a developing pipeline,” Mischa Fisher, chief economist at Zillow, said in the report. “A year-over-year surge in out-of-town browsing in places like Buffalo and Chicago tells us a wave of newcomers may not be far behind.”Buffalo is the clearest case study.The average home value in the city sits at $249,040, a fraction of the $434,100 national median for an existing home sold in July, according to the National Association of Realtors. Homes there are also moving fast, going to pending in about 10 days, and prices have climbed 104% since the start of the pandemic, according to Parcl Labs data. Despite that run-up, Buffalo remains one of the more attainable markets in the entire Northeast, and renters testing out the city before buying appear to be catching on early.Houston tells a slightly different story, one built on jobs rather than sheer cost.

The metro’s median sale price was $360,000 over the three months ending in July, up 2.2% year-over-year, according to Redfin, while Zillow put t...