Ranking the hottest housing markets in the Twin Cities

With sales down and housing listings up, the housing market in the Twin Cities during 2018 was less frothy than it was the year before. Unless, of course, you were a first-time buyer or a downsizing Baby Boomer. Entry-level buyers outpaced sellers, and construction costs soared, pushing sale prices across the metro to a record high.

To find out which parts of the Twin Cities metro were most feverish, the Star Tribune compiled its third annual Hot Housing Index. The index ranks communities based on where houses sold more quickly than the year before, prices posted the biggest gains and sellers got closest to their asking price.

The trends were clear: Markets that fared the best were inner-ring suburbs like Crystal, Richfield and St. Anthony where houses are modest and close to the central cities. A few once-sleepy exurbs also stood out, including Otsego and Dayton where land is cheap and housing construction was unusually robust.

The Hot Housing Index combines four key housing metrics from year-end data provided by the Minneapolis Area Realtors: change in the median price per square foot; median days on market; percent of list price received by seller and share of all sales that were foreclosures or short sales. We ranked each community on the four metrics, then added the rankings together to get an index score.

Use the search tool below to see rankings for the 108 cities included in the Hot Housing Index, plus historical real estate sales data for those cities and an additional 62 cities in the 13-county metro area that didn't have enough sales last year to be included in the index. Historical data is also available for Minneapolis and St. Paul neighborhoods.