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 sale price of an ordinary home in the US Northeast this year, up roughly four percent year on year.

Nationally, prices are rising in eighty percent of urban areas; a year ago the figure was seventy percent.

So the sentence 'housing got expensive again' holds up.

But what I want to get at today is a more counterintuitive question: where in America is the competition actually fiercest?

Each year an organisation compiles a ranking of which ZIP codes have the most sought-after homes.

Two criteria: how long a listing takes to sell, and how many people view it online.

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

Of the remaining nine in the top ten, all are in the Northeast and Midwest, the overwhelming majority in the suburbs of Boston, New York and Philadelphia.

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

So: why these places?

The most intuitive explanation is price — priced out of the centre, people move outward, so the hottest markets should be the cheapest ones.

It sounds reasonable, and the data does not support it.

Homes in these ten areas are not cheap; a good share of them price above the national median.

The real reason is supply.

Listings currently for sale in these ten areas are sixty percent below pre-pandemic levels.

The national average is ten percent below.

Sixty versus ten is not a difference of degree. Those are two different markets.

When the pool of available homes shrinks that far, buyer behaviour changes wholesale.

A house lists, and viewers do not trickle in — they all show up the same weekend, and then bid simultaneously.

The result: nine of these ten areas close above asking, with an average premium of about four percent.

Nationally, an ordinary home typically closes about two percent below asking.

One closes at a premium, one at a discount. That is the dividing line.

Which leads to the deeper question: why is it the Northeast and Midwest that are short of housing?

Behind it sits a structural divergence more than a decade in the making.

The South and West have been building at scale for years — land is relatively plentiful, permitting relatively loose, and supply can track population inflows.

The Northeast is the reverse: developable land around many cities was limited to start with, local permitting is slow, and the rate of new construction has stayed low for a long time.

While prices were flat, the problem stayed hidden and nobody treated it as one.

Once demand returned and the existing stock was locked up, the scarcity surfaced immediately.

And there is a factor that gets overlooked: current owners do not want to sell.

Many are holding mortgages taken out years ago at low rates; selling and rebuying means accepting today's far higher rate.

So they sit still, and the resale pool contracts further.

So this ranking is not really telling you where the market is hottest.

What it records is where the housing shortage is worst.

Finally, what these suburbs share: the commute.

Most sit inside an hour of a major city, offering more living space while keeping the job in town.

That is close to the standard profile of American housing demand these past few years.

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