"People are looking for extra yield," Janice Stanton, senior managing director of capital markets for brokerage Cushman & Wakefield Inc., said in a phone interview. "You'll see a move to the secondary markets because there's a higher yield there and also lending is coming back in those markets."

Property investors are attracted to cities with population or job increases or both, according to Christopher Macke, senior real estate strategist at CoStar. Dallas and Denver benefit from an influx of people and San Francisco, Seattle and Boston are boosted by strength in the technology industry, Macke said.

"These are all markets that have performed better on the employment side," Macke said.

Minnesota Demand

The jobs outlook is one of the reasons real estate investors are turning to the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, said Whitney Peyton, senior managing director for broker CB Richard Ellis Group Inc. The region has gone from "out of interest" to in demand for buyers seeking higher returns, he said.

"They're getting the yields that they want and the properties are good and the communities are good," said Peyton, who is based in Minneapolis. "It's a flight to pricing."

The area's roster of Fortune 500 companies, which include Target Corp. (TGT) and Best Buy Co., and its well-educated workforce make it attractive to real estate investors, he said. The Minneapolis-St. Paul area's unemployment rate was 6.8 percent in March, below the national rate of 8.8 percent that month.

Texas properties are luring investors because of the state's prospects for economic growth, said Bach of Grubb & Ellis. There is no state income tax and housing is less expensive than other areas of the country. About 251,000 non- farm jobs were added in the 12 months through March, according to the Texas Workforce Commission.

Oil Benefit

Every metropolitan area in the state is increasing jobs and "commercial real estate seems to have stabilized," said Mark Dotzour, chief economist of the Real Estate Center at Texas A&M University in College Station.

The economy is benefiting from rising oil prices, he said. Crude futures jumped about 45 percent in the past two years and reached $113.93 a barrel on April 29, the highest since 2008.