Housing Market Methodology

Geographic model

Public routes follow a state, county, metro, and ZIP hierarchy. A ZIP is assigned to one canonical metro route for navigation and search consistency, even when real-world metropolitan boundaries cross county lines.

Metro pages summarize tracked ZIPs in the active public scope. They should not be read as a complete census of every neighborhood or municipality in the broader metropolitan statistical area.

Market interpretation

Price and rent describe cost levels. Inventory, new listings, homes going pending, buyer competition, price cuts, and days to pending describe supply, demand, and negotiating conditions. No single metric determines whether a market is hot, cooling, buyer-friendly, or seller-friendly.

We compare several indicators and preserve missing values rather than estimating an unavailable ZIP measure. Month-over-month movement is treated as short-term context and should be checked against longer trends where available.

Publication and quality gates

A promoted dataset must pass source, schema, coverage, transformation, and serving checks. Question and comparison pages have additional requirements for entity coverage, available measures, unique evidence, internal links, and useful article depth.

Pages that remain useful for navigation but do not meet the current quality threshold may stay accessible with noindex and are excluded from XML sitemaps. Internal readiness labels are not shown to visitors.

Important limitations

The methodology describes market direction, not fair value for a particular property. It does not model inspection findings, renovations, title issues, flood or climate exposure, school assignment, association reserves, special assessments, individual tax treatment, loan eligibility, or future interest rates.