全美最抢手的十个地方，房子都不便宜——因为几乎没房可卖

Start with a number: five hundred and forty thousand dollars.

That is the median price of an ordinary home in the US Northeast this year, up about four percent on last year.

Across the country, prices are rising in eighty percent of urban areas; a year ago that figure was only seventy percent.

So yes, housing has got more expensive again.

But what I want to talk about today is a different question: where is the competition fiercest?

Every year an organisation ranks which ZIP codes have the most sought-after homes.

'Most sought-after' measures two things: how long a house sits before it sells, and how many people view the listing online.

This year's ranking is out, and number one is Peabody, a small place next to Boston.

The other nine are all in the Northeast and Midwest too, mostly in the suburbs of Boston, New York and Philadelphia.

This is the fourth year running that the entire top ten has come from those two regions.

So the question: why these places?

The intuitive answer is that the most fought-over places should be the cheapest ones, because people priced out of the city centre have to look further out.

But the data does not support that. Houses in these areas are not cheap.

The real reason is supply.

The number of homes for sale in these ten areas is sixty percent below what it was before the pandemic.

The national average is only ten percent below.

That is an enormous gap.

When listings get that scarce, market behaviour changes completely.

A house comes on the market and a lot of people go to see it at the same time, and then bid at the same time.

The result: in nine of these ten areas, homes finally sell above the asking price, by about four percent on average.

Nationally, an ordinary home usually sells about two percent below asking.

One above asking, one below — that is the line between fought-over and not.

So why the Northeast and Midwest specifically?

One reason often cited is that these places built too few new homes for many years.

The South and West have been building heavily, supply keeps up, and prices are less strained.

The Northeast is different: developable land around many cities was limited to begin with, permitting is slow, and new housing never catches up.

So when a wave of people starts looking, there simply are not enough houses on the market to absorb them.

There is one more thing these suburbs have in common: an easy commute.

Most sit within an hour of a big city, letting you live with more space while keeping the job in town.

That also explains why this ranking has not changed in four years.

What it really records is: where the housing shortage is worst.

Think about it: if homes were scarce enough that you had to fight for one, would you bid higher, or move further out?