Saturday, January 10, 2026
Providence PHOTO: GoLocal
Zillow ranks Providence as the 4th hottest real estate market in America.
“Zillow predicts Hartford, Buffalo, New York City, Providence and San Jose will be the hottest housing markets of 2026. In these metros, Zillow expects few price cuts, fast-moving listings and strong price growth,” said the company.
Hartford has the fewest homes available compared to pre-pandemic of any major market; inventory is still down 63%. That is a hallmark of strong buyer competition. More than 66% of homes sold above list price in Hartford in 2025, leading all major metros.
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As GoLocal reported earlier on Friday, statewide numbers in Rhode Island show a slight dip in the median price of a single-family home.
A strong home price forecast and demand that far outpaces supply are common threads among what should be the most competitive markets for buyers in 2026.
How Zillow Computes the Rankings:
Price Growth
Home value appreciation flattened out nationwide in 2025, with half of major markets seeing home values drop. As the market adjusts to a new normal of 6% mortgage rates, Zillow forecasts home prices in the majority of markets (37) to rise this coming year.
Among the five hottest markets of 2025, all have an above-average outlook for home value appreciation. At the upper end of this range is our No. 1 market, Hartford, with forecasted home value growth of nearly 4%, following 4.3% appreciation over 2025. This eclipses Buffalo’s 2.5% forecast for 2026.
Inventory & Velocity
The inflow of new listings only recovered slightly over the course of 2025, but an increasing time on market helped overall inventory levels inch back towards pre-pandemic levels. It’s likely that these low-inventory markets, where homes sold quickly in 2025, will continue to experience outsized demand relative to supply in 2026. The markets with the fewest listing days per home in 2025 – those where inventory was lowest and sold the fastest – were Hartford, St. Louis, and Cincinnati, with St. Louis being a new addition from last year.
Competition
Newly incorporated into the index this year are two measures of buyer competition: the share of listings with a price cut, and the share of homes that sold above list price. Metros where it is not likely for sellers to need to cut their price and where sellers are likely to get offers above their listing price can be signs of bidding wars. Hartford, Buffalo and San Jose each have over 60% of homes that sold above list, the highest of the markets considered. When it comes to the likelihood of seeing price cuts, New York is the toughest market, with only 13.5% of listings with a price cut. This ranges up to 33% in Phoenix.
Methodology
The final index was based on the following data:
Zillow Home Price Appreciation forecast of annual home value appreciation in Oct. 2026.
Forecast acceleration in home value appreciation, Oct. 2025 – Oct. 2026
Listing days per home on Zillow, Oct. 2024 – Oct. 2025
Two-year change in total non-farm employment per two-year residential building permit total Aug. 2023 – Aug. 2025
Average share of listings with a price cut on Zillow, Oct. 2024 – Oct. 2025
Average share of homes that sold above list, Sept. 2024 – Sept. 2025
Metrics were normalized given the available metro-level data to standard deviations from the mean. The final index is an average across metrics, with standardized home price appreciation acceleration down-weighted by half.
Inventory and velocity are represented by listing days per home, using published Zillow data for Median Days to Pending and New Listings.
Job market and building data took the ratio of the change in employment to the total permitted residential structures. Total non-farm employment (seasonally adjusted) comes from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Current Employment Statistics survey. We used the two-year change in employment Aug. 2023 – Aug. 2025.
Building permit data comes from New Private Housing Structures Authorized by Building Permits. We sum over the two-year period Aug. 2023 – Aug. 2025.
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