The Two Margins of Housing Search

After 2020 more searchers crossed their city boundary, but they did not look farther.

Area (travel-to-work area)
Sale
Rent
Bars (left axis): mean search distance, km. Lines (right axis): share of residents crossing the edge, %.

Sale and rent together, with the two margins as two kinds of mark on two axes: bars for how far searchers look (left, kilometres) and lines for how many cross their travel-to-work-area boundary (right, per cent). Around the pandemic the bars stay roughly level while the lines climb, so more people crossed the edge but did not look farther; the sale line then falls back while the rental line stays high. Both axes rescale to the chosen area; smaller areas have noisier figures, search signals interest rather than a completed move, and England is the reliable canvas.