A couple who started their home search in Millcreek, Sugar House and Draper ended up buying a bungalow in Ogden for roughly $200,000 less than a comparable property would have cost closer to Salt Lake City.

They're not alone. More than 70% of homebuyers in the Salt Lake City metro area searched outside their local market in the first quarter of 2026, according to a Realtor.com analysis published Tuesday, Aug. 25. The report dubbed these buyers "Affordability Refugees" and identified Ogden as the top destination for Salt Lake-area shoppers looking for homes priced 5% to 15% less.

The trend puts numbers behind what Millcreek residents already feel. As we reported Aug. 25, the Millcreek ZIP code hit a record $893,000 median home price, and Salt Lake County's average sale price reached $694,113 in July, up 6.1% from a year earlier, according to the Utah Association of Realtors.

Ogden real estate agent Michelle Williams, who also serves as treasurer of the Utah Association of Realtors, told the Deseret News she's seeing more clients from Salt Lake City's east side.

"They started out looking in Salt Lake, Millcreek, Sugar House. They even mentioned Draper," Williams said of the couple closing on an East Bench bungalow. "They decided they could find more attainable housing in Ogden."

Williams said the couple, a surgical manager at a Salt Lake hospital and a University of Utah law school student, told her they were willing to commute rather than be "house poor." Weber County's average home sale price in July was $520,969, a 5.2% drop from the year before, while Salt Lake County prices climbed.

Nationally, cross-market home searches hit 60% of buyers in the 100 largest U.S. metros in the second quarter of 2026, up from about 48% in 2019, the Realtor.com report found. The West led all regions at 65%. Realtor.com senior economist Jiayi Xu said affordability "retains shoppers when present, pulls them in from pricier markets, and pushes them out once it's gone."

Williams said the stigma that once kept Salt Lake residents from considering Ogden is fading. People from Salt Lake used to view Ogden as "kind of not the cool place to be," she said, but that mentality is changing as prices push buyers farther along the Wasatch Front.

She expects the outward push to continue. "This is something we'll see more and more of as people start migrating to Salt Lake for different things," Williams said. "I think they're going to start looking farther and farther out."

No Millcreek city officials have publicly commented on the buyer-migration data.