Buying a Home Without Setting Foot Inside: How Remote Homebuying Became the New Normal

Not that long ago, making an offer on a house you'd never set foot in would have been the kind of thing that made your real estate agent quietly question your judgment. Maybe your family too. Yet somewhere between lockdowns, remote work, and a housing market that refused to slow down, this became something millions of Americans just... did.

According to a survey commissioned by Redfin, 63% of people who bought a home in 2020 made an offer on a property they had never seen in person. That’s not a rounding error — it’s nearly two out of every three buyers. A year earlier, that number was 32%. Two years earlier, it barely registered. This isn’t just pandemic behavior — it’s the moment homebuying broke away from physical presence and became a digitally driven decision.

So what happened? A lot, obviously. But the short version is that a pandemic collided with a hot housing market right at the moment when virtual tour technology had gotten good enough to actually use.

When Sight-Unseen Buying Backfires in Florida

Buying remotely anywhere carries risk. Buying remotely in Northeast Florida carries specific risks that out-of-state buyers routinely underestimate -- and sometimes don't discover until after closing.

Flood zones are the big one. Areas like Jacksonville Beach, Nocatee, Green Cove Springs, and properties along the St. Johns River sit in FEMA-designated flood zones where flood insurance isn't optional -- it's mandatory if you carry a federally backed mortgage. And flood insurance is always a separate policy from your homeowners coverage. Standard policies don't cover it. For buyers coming from states where flooding isn't a routine consideration, this comes as an unwelcome surprise when the numbers hit. St. Johns County alone has seen high tides driven by nor'easters and hurricanes erode beaches and destabilize homes near the coast in recent years.

Then there's Florida's insurance market, which has been in genuine crisis for years and is only now starting to stabilize -- slowly. Florida's average annual cost of home insurance hit $8,292 in 2025, an 18% increase over 2024, making it the most expensive state in the country for homeowners coverage. And that figure doesn't include flood insurance, which is always a separate policy -- standard homeowners coverage doesn't touch it. With insurers recalculating their risk models across the state and major carriers pulling back from Florida entirely, buyers relocating from Ohio or Pennsylvania often don't feel the full weight of those numbers until they're sitting at the closing table trying to get coverage -- and suddenly doing the math on what this house actually costs per month.

The neighborhood mismatch problem is quieter but just as real. A street can photograph beautifully and still have drainage issues every August. A community can look peaceful on a Saturday afternoon video tour and have an HOA with restrictive rules that don't show up until you request the documents. These are things a local agent catches on a Tuesday morning when nobody's staging anything.

None of this means don't buy remotely. It means go in with your eyes open, because the listing won't do it for you.

Where Things Stand Today

The 63% figure from 2020 was a pandemic spike, but the behavior it revealed didn't quietly disappear when life reopened. If anything, it normalized. The tools got better, buyers got more comfortable, and for a lot of people in competitive markets, there simply wasn't time to fly out before someone else made an offer.

By 2025, nearly 20% of homebuyers were still making offers sight unseen -- up from just 3% in 2019. That's well below the 2020 peak, sure. But think about what that baseline actually means. One in five buyers is making the biggest financial decision of their life without walking through the front door first. That's not a pandemic quirk anymore. That's just how some people buy houses now.

Around 74% of millennials said they'd still consider buying sight unseen in 2025. Down from 85% the year before, but still -- three out of four. The comfort level with remote purchasing is permanently different than it was five years ago, and no amount of market cooling is going to change that.

What This Means If You're Buying

in Florida Right Now

While inbound migration to Florida has cooled overall, Jacksonville has managed to hold its ground. According to the PODS Moving Trends Report, Jacksonville ranked No. 10 on the 2025 list of top relocation destinations nationally -- one of only two Florida metros to crack the top 20, joining Ocala. Orlando and Fort Myers fell off the list entirely. Jacksonville's staying power comes down to a few things: relatively affordable housing, miles of coastline, an expanding job market, and lower exposure to the extreme weather events battering South Florida. For the second year running, the largest outflows nationally are coming from Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Miami -- and a good chunk of those buyers are landing here.

Which means if you're selling here, your listing's digital presence isn't a nice-to-have anymore. For a lot of buyers, the 3D walkthrough IS the showing. The listing photos ARE the open house. If those aren't good, those buyers move on before they ever pick up the phone.

And if you're buying here from out of state, get a local agent who actually knows the neighborhoods -- not just the ones that photograph well, but the ones that live well. Someone who can tell you which streets flood in August, which areas are growing, and which blocks on Zillow look better than they actually are in person. That's not something a video tour can tell you.

The Shift That Stuck

Redfin chief economist Daryl Fairweather called it in early 2021: "The virtual home tour is here to stay." Easy thing to say at the time. Harder to actually be right about. But five years later, she was. The number came down from its pandemic high, sure -- but the underlying behavior didn't reverse. Buyers who figured out they could purchase a home remotely without getting burned didn't suddenly decide they needed to fly out for every showing again. Why would they?

The 63% figure from 2020 tells you where things were heading. The 20% figure from 2025 tells you where they landed. That's not a retreat -- that's a new floor.

A Note on the Data

The core figures cited here come from a Redfin-commissioned survey conducted between November 19, 2020 and January 4, 2021. More than 4,700 U.S. and Canadian residents participated -- all of whom had bought or sold a primary residence in the prior year, or planned to within the next 12 months. The sight-unseen figures specifically reflect responses from the 1,900+ buyers in that group. Redfin also cross-referenced results against similar surveys from prior years, which is what makes the year-over-year jump from 32% to 63% so striking. Current trend data draws from the Real Estate Witch 2025 Millennial Home Buyer Report, FastExpert, U-Haul's 2025 Growth Index, PODS Moving Trends Report 2025, and Insurify's 2025 Florida Home Insurance Report.