Find the hot housing markets in the Twin Cities

Are you living in a hot housing market?

To find out, the Star Tribune's housing market index combines four key housing metrics for cities with more than 100 sales last year: Change in the average price per square foot; average days on market; percent of list price received by sellers and share of all sales that were foreclosures and short sales.

The Star Tribune ranked each community on the four metrics, then added the rankings together to get an index score. (More details are at the bottom of the page.)

The higher the index score, the more likely houses in those areas were likely to sell quickly and for nearly the full asking price. And because of big price gains, these were also communities that had few distressed sales.

Minneapolis and St. Paul neighborhoods, which had far fewer sales than their suburban counterparts, were compared with one another separately.

Use the map and list below to find your community and see deeper details about how it scored on the index and some key demographics. (Note it only includes communities with 100 or more sales in 2016.) Use the toggle button below the map to see index results for Minneapolis and St. Paul neighborhoods instead.

All data come from MAAR and RMLS of MN, Inc. Data deemed reliable but not guaranteed. Not to be reproduced without MAAR's consent. Minneapolis Area Association of Realtors

About the index:
Numerical rankings were assigned to each community on four metrics, then those rankings were added together to create the final index score. We compared 103 cities against each other, and separately compared the 100 Minneapolis and St. Paul neighborhoods against each other. Here's how the rankings worked for the four metrics:
1) We calculated the percentage change between the average price per square foot in 2016 and the average across the previous four years. The change between those two numbers was then ranked. A ranking of 1 represented the lowest change, while the highest score was 103 for the city analysis and 100 for the neighborhood analysis.

2) For 2016 average days on market, a score of 1 represented the longest days on market, while the city with the shortest days on market got the highest score (either 103 for cities or 100 for neighborhoods).

3) For the 2016 percent of original list price received, the community with the lowest percentage received a score of 1. The highest-scoring communities tended to have average percentage of list price received at or above 99 percent.

4) The index also factored in the percentage of distressed sales in 2016 (foreclosures and short sales). In this case, the community received a ranking of 1 if it had the highest percentage of distressed sales. Communities with low percentages of distressed sales got the highest rankings.