This is a huge factor. A large amount of the real estate boom and bust has been concentrated in a fairly small section of the US: CA, NV, FL and maybe AZ. If yo

This is a huge factor. A large amount of the real estate boom and bust has been concentrated in a fairly small section of the US: CA, NV, FL and maybe AZ. If you want to move out of CA's central valley to a job in, say, Boston MA, you're going to be screwed: the fall in home values in the Central Valley is much much larger than the fall in home values in the Boston metro area. And that's not an isolated example: people don't generally leave on economically ruined area for another. They want to go to places that are not economically ruined, and such places tend to have more stable real estate markets where prices took much less of a cliff dive over the last few years.