Insurify’s Best Up & Coming Housing Markets Award 2020

Click here to see the winners of the Best Up and Coming Housing Markets Awards for 2021.

Guides to the hottest housing markets or to the best cities for families or retirees are a dime a dozen. These generally focus on existing real estate behemoths, but which are the up and coming housing markets of tomorrow?

In many places around the United States, the process of buying or selling a home just doesn’t look the same today as it did a year, or even six months, ago. Though housing prices haven’t dropped during the fallout of the current outbreak (at least so far), that doesn’t mean there haven’t been significant changes in the way we conduct real estate. Many showings are now done either entirely virtually or with strict safety precautions, including the implementation of masks, social distancing, hand sanitizer, ‘no surface contact’ policies, and even forms.

However, despite both these limitations and widespread economic hardship, many people are still looking to move. Some may need to downsize for financial reasons whereas others may be motivated to make a change given new work-from-home policies. Regardless, this real estate traffic is not evenly distributed across all communities. Some cities have long enjoyed strong housing markets while others have been faltering for years. But which cities show signs of becoming the robust realty markets of tomorrow?

While they may or may not have made a name for themselves in real estate just yet, these cities have been identified as the best up and coming housing markets of 2020!

Selection Process for Insurify’s 2020 Best Up and Coming Housing Markets Awards

To identify the cities with the strongest real estate growth metrics, the data science and research team at Insurify, a website to compare home insurance quotes, turned to Zillow Research. Using a proprietary scoring algorithm, cities were assigned a score based on the relative change in home value between 2010 and 2020, the monthly home value trend from 2019 to 2020, the monthly trend in median home sales prices from 2019 to 2020, and Zillow’s 2021 home value forecast. The city with the highest overall score in each state was identified as the winner. This analysis only applied to incorporated cities with a population exceeding 1500 residents as of the last publicly available census, and states with insufficient municipal data (Hawaii and West Virginia) were excluded.

The Best Up & Coming Housing Markets 2020

Alabama: Pell City

Alaska: Seward

Arizona: El Mirage

Arkansas: Corning

California: San Marino

Colorado: Akron

Connecticut: Brookfield

Delaware: Milford

Florida: Eatonville

Georgia: Forest Park

Idaho: Caldwell

Illinois: North Chicago

Indiana: Auburn

Iowa: Oakland

Kansas: Satanta

Kentucky: Ludlow

Louisiana: Donaldsonville

Maine: Parsonsfield

Maryland: Bladensburg

Massachusetts: Webster

Michigan: Hamtramck

Minnesota: East Bethel

Mississippi: Gautier

Missouri: Joplin

Montana: Manhattan

Nebraska: Madison

Nevada: Carlin

New Hampshire: Derry

New Jersey: Trenton

New Mexico: Jal

New York: Silver Creek

North Carolina: Pine Level

North Dakota: Williston

Ohio: Trotwood

Oklahoma: Langston

Oregon: Baker City

Pennsylvania: Cressona

Rhode Island: Providence

South Carolina: Woodruff

South Dakota: Hartford

Tennessee: Pigeon Forge

Texas: Cockrell Hill

Utah: South Salt Lake

Vermont: Essex Junction

Virginia: Richmond

Washington: Aberdeen

Wisconsin: Arcadia

Wyoming: Wheatland

If you have questions or comments about this article, please contact insights@insurify.com