When housing search reorganised after 2020, it did so on one margin and not the other. The extensive margin, the share of residents whose search crosses their travel-to-work-area boundary, jumped. The intensive margin, how far those leavers actually look, barely moved. So the pandemic did not bring the “death of distance”: more people searched beyond their own city, but not appreciably farther afield.
The chart carries the two margins as two different marks on two axes, so they are never mistaken for one quantity. The bars, in the lower half, are the intensive margin, the mean distance leavers look, read off the left axis in kilometres and labelled with their value. The lines, in the upper half, are the extensive margin, the share of residents crossing their boundary, read off the right axis in per cent. Sale is shown in blue and rent in purple, so both markets sit in one chart for comparison. The finding is the contrast between the halves: around 2020 to 2021 the bars stay roughly level while the lines climb, so more people crossed the edge but did not look farther. The national sale line falls back by 2025 while the rental line stays high, consistent with renters searching persistently wider under affordability pressure, and individual cities vary (Manchester’s boundary-crossing rose sharply and stayed high). Choose an area to see your own city, and hover any year for its figures. Both axes rescale to the chosen area so the bars fill the lower half and the lines the upper; smaller areas have noisier figures, search signals interest rather than a completed move, and England is the reliable canvas.
Did distance die?
The chart above shows that more searchers crossed their boundary after 2020. A natural worry is that remote work also let them search much farther, a “death of distance” that would scatter demand across the country and undo the case for place-based policy. A gravity model tests this directly. Search flow between two areas is modelled as falling with the distance between them, once each area’s own tendency to send and to attract search is taken out:
where is the number of property-search enquiries from residents of travel-to-work area about properties in area ; is the great-circle distance between the two areas’ centroids; and and are origin and destination fixed effects that absorb how much search each area sends and attracts overall, so that is identified only from how flow falls with distance across corridors, not from any area’s size. The coefficient is the distance-decay elasticity: a more negative value means distance still deters search more strongly, and a value near zero would mean distance had stopped mattering. Fitted by ordinary least squares, separately for each year and each tenure, on the balanced set of origin-to-destination corridors present in every year from 2016 to 2025, holds close to throughout and never approaches zero. The pull of distance survived the pandemic; what changed was whether people looked beyond their boundary at all, not how far those who did look were willing to go.