How We Read a City Housing Market

Every Dynamic.RE city page is built the same careful way: from monthly listing data, compared with the city's own history, and checked before it goes out. This page explains what each number means and what it cannot tell you.

What the median price on a city page is

It is the median asking price of homes listed for sale. We build it from every ZIP code in the city: each ZIP's median and average asking price describe how its prices spread out, and we find the middle of all the city's listings together. That keeps a few expensive ZIP codes from pulling the city's number up.

Redfin reports prices homes sold for, and Zillow reports an estimated value for every home, listed or not. All three can be right and still differ by tens of thousands of dollars. Use the asking price to see what sellers want today. Use sold prices to see what buyers paid.

The median also moves when the mix of homes for sale changes. If smaller homes come to market, the median falls even when no seller cut a price. So we read price direction on asking price per square foot, and when the two disagree by more than a few points, the page says so and explains why.

Which area "the city" covers

A city's figures combine every ZIP code with that city's mailing address. Mailing ZIPs often reach past city limits, so our numbers can differ from city-limits figures. Each city page lists its ZIP codes. For the largest cities our data combines at most 50 ZIP codes, and those pages say so, because counts such as homes for sale run low there.

How we call a buyer's or seller's market

We compare each city with itself: the same calendar month in 2017, 2018 and 2019, before the pandemic. Comparing the same month removes the normal spring rush and winter slowdown. We look at four signals:

• Days on market: how long the typical listing has been up.
• Homes for sale: the count of active listings.
• Price cuts: the share of listings that have cut their asking price.
• Homes under contract: pending sales for every 100 homes still for sale.

When the signals together lean about 15% or more toward sellers, and all but one point the same way, the page says sellers have more pull than usual. The mirror image is a buyer's market. Anything in between is balanced. A city can lean toward sellers against its own history and still rank as one of the less competitive markets in its state. Both are true, and each page shows both.

When we leave pending sales out

In some areas, pending sales were barely recorded before about 2023. In those cities the pending count tracks how well sales got reported, so we leave it out of the verdict, the rankings and the text, and the demand tile shows a dash.

What days on market means here

It is the age of the listings on the market that month. A listing stops counting when it sells, so the full time to sell can run longer. We use it to compare a city with its past and with other cities. It is not a promise of how fast your home will sell.

Seasons, rankings and what stands out

• Seasons: we average each calendar month against its own year over every complete year of data, then name the months when asking prices run lowest and listings run highest.
• State rankings: each city is ranked among the cities we track in its state, with its two closest neighbors on each measure.
• What stands out: a fact appears there only when the city sits in the top or bottom 10% of the 765 cities we track.

Renters, incomes and fair market rent

Renter share, vacancy, income and population come from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey five-year estimates, added up across the city's ZIP code areas. HUD fair market rent is set for a whole county or metro area. It includes utilities the tenant pays and sits at the 40th percentile of local rents, so one home's rent can be well above or below it. The rent a median-income tenant can afford uses the common rule of 30% of income.

How often pages update

Every city page refreshes monthly and shows the month its data runs through. Market data describes a city. To see what one address would rent for and whether it cash flows, run it through Dynamic.RE. You get five free property analyses a month.