What is on each market page
Each metro page carries the same seven Zillow Research indicators, the month each one belongs to, its year-over-year change, and a five-year trend line. Below the numbers is a plain read-out of what the combination describes — whether inventory is growing because sellers arrived or because homes stopped selling, for instance, which the inventory figure alone cannot tell you.
Why twenty markets and not every metro
Zillow publishes these series for over nine hundred metro areas, and generating a page for each would take an afternoon. It would also be nine hundred pages nobody asked for. These twenty are the markets where the data is complete across all seven indicators for the full five years and where we also track local government housing decisions, so the market page and the policy tracker for the same city each have something the other does not.
How to use this if you sell real estate
Metro figures are a backdrop, not a valuation — the statistical area is far wider than the city, and a single ZIP code routinely sits well outside these numbers. What they are good for is the sentence at the start of a client conversation: how the market moved over the year, whether it is getting faster or slower, and whether the pool of homes is growing. That is the part most agents restate from national headlines that do not describe their market at all.