DEV Community: Michael Montgomery

While Everyone Watched Austin and Phoenix, These Markets Were Different

Michael Montgomery — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 17:59:31 +0000

While everyone watched Austin and Phoenix, these markets were building home equity the slow, boring way.

Open any housing market article from the last five years and you'll find the same cities: Austin. Phoenix. Tampa. Nashville.

These markets got the headlines because they got the price spikes. From 2020 to 2022, Sun Belt home value appreciation was impossible to miss.

What got missed: a set of Midwest and mid-Atlantic markets quietly compounding home values at 8–12% annually with a fraction of the volatility. No headlines. No viral tweets. Just steady, unglamorous appreciation that shows up clearly when you look at ZIP-level data over a 10-year window.

Here are five of them.

Columbus, Ohio

Columbus doesn't get written about in national housing coverage. That's partly why it's been a consistent performer.

The metro has a diversified employer base — a major university, insurance, finance, and a growing tech presence — that drives steady housing demand without the boom-bust cycle that follows a single dominant employer.

At the ZIP level, neighborhoods on the northeast and northwest sides of Columbus show 10-year home price appreciation that rivals many coastal markets on a percentage basis, at a fraction of the price point. Lower entry costs mean stronger yield potential for investors. Slower runup means less correction risk for buyers.

Indianapolis, Indiana

Indianapolis is one of the most consistent housing markets in the dataset. It doesn't spike. It doesn't crash. It compounds steadily year over year.

For buyers, that consistency is underrated. A market that appreciates 6–8% annually without wild swings is often a better long-term wealth builder than one that surges 25% and corrects 15%.

Specific ZIP codes in Carmel, Fishers, and Zionsville — suburbs with strong school districts and employer proximity — have shown particularly strong home value appreciation over 5 and 10-year windows.

Kansas City, Missouri

Kansas City benefits from a low cost of living, a growing tech and healthcare presence, and a metro that spans two states — giving buyers more geographic flexibility than most markets.

ZIP-level home value data shows a clear pattern: inner-ring suburbs and revitalizing urban neighborhoods have significantly outperformed the metro average over the last decade. The overall metro numbers look modest. Specific ZIPs tell a different story.

Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina

The Research Triangle's concentration of universities, biotech, and tech employers has driven sustained housing demand that shows up clearly in 5 and 10-year ZIP-level data.

Unlike Sun Belt markets that saw extreme run-ups followed by corrections, Raleigh-Durham's home price appreciation has been more durable — driven by fundamentals rather than speculation. The metro average understates how well specific ZIPs have performed.

Charlotte, North Carolina

Charlotte has quietly become one of the more important financial hubs in the country. That employer base creates sustained housing demand that doesn't show up in national housing narratives.

At the ZIP level, neighborhoods like NoDa and West Charlotte have seen 10-year home price appreciation exceeding 200% — numbers the metro average completely obscures. ZIP 28208 alone appreciated 209.8% over the last decade. The city-level number would never tell you that.

What These Markets Have in Common

Five things stand out across all of them:

Diversified employer base — not dependent on one company or sector
Affordable entry points — lower prices sustain buyer demand
Population growth — all five are net migration positive over the last decade
Low volatility — slower to spike means slower to correct
ZIP-level variance — even within these markets, specific neighborhoods significantly outperform

That last point matters most. Knowing Columbus is a solid market is useful. Knowing which specific ZIP codes in Columbus have the strongest 10-year home appreciation track record is what actually helps you buy.

How to Look This Up Yourself

HomeSight maps home value appreciation for every ZIP code in the country, going back 20 years.

Pull up any of these metros, switch to the 10-year view, and the top-performing ZIPs surface immediately in the rankings panel — no manual research required.

Free at homesight.live — no account required.

Past home value appreciation is not a guarantee of future performance.

I Mapped Home Prices Across 26,000 U.S. ZIP Codes. Here's What City Averages Are Hiding.

Michael Montgomery — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 22:39:02 +0000

Two ZIP codes. Same city. 13x apart in home value growth.

75225 — University Park, Dallas. Home values up 26% over 3 years.

75252 — North Dallas. Home values up 1.9% over 3 years.

Same metro. Same window. A 13x gap in home price appreciation.

When I found this, I checked my math. Then I checked it again. The numbers were right — and this wasn't a fluke. Once I started looking at ZIP-level home value data instead of metro averages, I found the same pattern everywhere.

Sun Belt cities where massive metro-level home price gains hid flat or declining ZIPs underneath. Midwest markets written off in every headline while specific neighborhoods quietly compounded home values at 10% a year for a decade. Old industrial cities with suburbs whose home appreciation outperformed markets people pay a premium to enter.

Metro averages were burying all of it.

City-Level Home Price Data Is the Wrong Unit

Every housing headline you've ever read is built on metro-level data. It's easy to produce: aggregate all home sales in a city, compute a median price, publish a number.

The problem is that number doesn't describe any actual neighborhood.

Dallas metro home values "up 10%" is a blend of University Park (+26%), North Dallas (+1.9%), and hundreds of ZIPs in between. That number is technically accurate. It's useless for deciding where to buy.

The variance in home price appreciation within a city is often larger than the variance between cities. Which ZIP you buy into matters more than which metro — but almost nothing shows you ZIP-level home value data clearly and for free.

That gap is what I built HomeSight to fill.

How I Processed the Home Value Data

HomeSight runs on a publicly available dataset tracking median home values at the ZIP level, updated monthly, going back to 2000.

For each of the 26,000+ ZIPs in the dataset, I calculated home value appreciation over 1, 3, 5, 10, and 20-year windows. I filtered out P.O. Box ZIPs, IRS processing centers, and any ZIP without enough transaction history to produce a reliable home price trend.

I also pulled in rent trends, median list prices, and new listing volume — because home price appreciation alone doesn't tell the full story. A ZIP up 20% with rising inventory is a different real estate bet than one up 20% with shrinking supply.

The result is a national picture of how home values have moved at the neighborhood level for the past two decades.

What the Home Value Data Actually Shows

Four patterns stand out across the full dataset.

Sun Belt home price gains were real — and uneven. Austin, Phoenix, and Tampa all showed big metro-level home value appreciation from 2020–2022. Zoom into individual ZIPs and it gets messier: outer suburban areas that boomed on remote-work demand are now flat or negative on a 3-year home price basis. Urban
cores held up far better. The metro average looks like a clean story. The ZIP-level home value data is a patchwork.

The Midwest is quietly building home equity. Columbus, Indianapolis, Kansas City — markets that never show up in housing headlines. At the ZIP level, you find specific neighborhoods that have compounded home values at 8–12% annually for a decade with low volatility. If you only look at metro comparisons,
you'd skip these entirely.

Old industrial cities have home value pockets the average hides. Metro Detroit gets written off constantly in national housing coverage. ZIP-level data shows suburbs like Royal Oak and Ferndale with 10-year home price appreciation that rivals markets people pay a premium to enter. The metro average buries
them completely.

The biggest home value gaps are within metros, not between them. This was the most consistent finding across the full dataset. The spread in home appreciation between the top and bottom ZIPs in a single metro often exceeds the spread between metros entirely. Picking the right ZIP matters more than picking
the right city — and that's the decision almost no free tool is designed to help you make.

Who This Is For

First-time buyers trying to understand what they're walking into. Buying into a ZIP that's appreciated 25% in home values over 3 years is a fundamentally different bet than one that's moved 3% — even if list prices look similar today.

Real estate investors who need to screen markets at scale. ZIP-level home value data lets you identify which neighborhoods have outperformed their metro before digging into individual properties. The rankings panel does this automatically for any city.

Current homeowners who want context on their own market. How does your ZIP's home value growth compare to your neighbors? To your metro median? To the national trend? The answer is usually more specific — and more interesting — than any headline will tell you.

What You Can Do With It

HomeSight is free at https://homesight.live/. No account, no email.

Every ZIP is color-coded by home value appreciation rate. Toggle between time windows and the map updates. Click any ZIP and you get:

1, 3, 5, 10, and 20-year home value appreciation
Rent trends over time
Median sale prices
New listing volume
Metro ranking — where this ZIP's home price growth sits relative to every other in the same city

One Honest Caveat

This dataset tracks median home value trends at the ZIP level — not individual sale prices or specific property types. It won't tell you why a ZIP appreciated or what's coming next. For that you need local knowledge: employer moves, transit announcements, neighborhood dynamics on the ground.

What it does tell you: exactly how much home values have moved, at the ZIP level, across the whole country, for the last 20 years. That's the baseline most buyers and investors are missing before they make a decision worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The Question Worth Asking

"Is Dallas a good real estate market?" is the wrong question.

"Which Dallas?" is the one that matters.

The same is true for every metro in this country. The answer has always been in the ZIP-level home value data — it just wasn't easy to see until now.

homesight.live — free, no signup required. I Mapped Home Prices Across 26,000 U.S. ZIP Codes. Here's What City Averages Are Hiding.

[Boost]

Michael Montgomery — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 22:27:31 +0000