Want to Buy a Home?
These are the Top 10 Hottest Housing Markets in the Country
Homebuyers are skipping the suburbs and exurbs of big cities and instead flocking to smaller, more affordable metro areas, according to Realtor.com’s list of hottest ZIP codes in the U.S., released exclusively to USA TODAY early Wednesday.
Millennials are driving the popularity of these areas – from Shawnee, Kansas, to Goffstown, New Hampshire. They are looking for cheaper housing that isn’t too far away from the downtowns of the nearby cities where they can dine, shop and work.
Affordability has been the motivating factor for the last five years as housing prices in some markets become too high. But this year’s even more extreme, says Danielle Hale, chief economist at Realtor.com.
“Those markets that came on the list versus those that fell off are much less expensive, about a third less expensive,” she says. “That’s helping those areas to attract buyers, particularly entry-level buyers and millennials, who are the biggest segment of buyers in the market.”
Half of the top 10 ZIP codes are making their debut on the list. The study ranked how hot a ZIP code was by how long it took a house to sell in a market, as well as how often that market was viewed on realtor.com, an aggregate of home listings.
Here are the hottest ZIP codes for housing:
Rochester, New York (14609)
Young professionals are flocking to this city on Lake Ontario for job opportunities in education and health care, along with the Wegmans Food Markets, which is headquartered there.
Time on market before selling:
17 days
Median listing price:
$125,050, up 13.7% year over year
Millennial buyers make up 43% of new purchase mortgages.
