Buyer's or Seller's Market? How to Read Any Metro in 60 Seconds.

You're looking at a metro you don't know well. Maybe a relocation, maybe a deal someone pitched you. You have about a minute before your attention moves on. Here's how to spend it well.

Step 1 — the score and label. The Alpha Score (0–100) and its temperature label are your one-glance verdict. Above 60 leans seller; 40–59 is balanced; below 40 leans buyer. That's the headline. The next three steps are about whether to trust it.

Step 2 — supply. Two numbers answer two different questions. Months of supply, shown with the market's metrics, is the leverage dial for today: under two months is a tight seller's market, four to six is balanced, and above six tilts to buyers. The Inventory Health bar looks ahead instead: it measures new homes permitted for a place's size against places of similar population, so a high bar means more supply is on the way. (The scores quoted in this article predate that: under the method they were computed with, Inventory Health measured how tight supply was.)

Step 3 — momentum next to supply. This pairing is where the read gets sharp. Rising prices on scarce listings is a genuine seller's market with fuel in the tank. Rising prices while listings pile up is a market that has likely already peaked, with the price line simply not caught up yet. Always read the two together — then glance at Inventory Health to see whether builders are about to add more.

Step 4 — affordability and jobs. These tell you whether the read will hold. A seller's market with strong jobs and room on affordability can stay hot. A seller's market where affordability is already stretched is running on borrowed time. This is the step that keeps you from being surprised next quarter.

LocalAlpha translates the Alpha Score into a plain label so you don't have to memorize cutoffs:

Worth knowing before you lean on the label: the bands are not evenly populated. Here is where every U.S. metro actually falls.

Two things fall out of that curve. The national median is 50, and the bulk of 943 metros sits in the Balanced band, so "balanced" is the default condition rather than a finding. And the Hot Seller's band above 75 is very nearly empty, so the label people reach for first describes almost nothing — all three markets here, Amarillo included at 57, land inside Balanced.

Here is the read on Austin in one glance: the score, the label, and the date the data is from.

Austin lands in the balanced band, but the bars tell the real story: price momentum has gone cold (prices are about 21% off their 2022 peak) and supply has loosened past five months, while a solid local economy and mid-pack affordability are what hold the score up. Rental yield is the one to watch — it has fallen hard, because Austin rents are now declining year over year, not merely growing slowly. Sixty seconds, and you know both what the market is and why. Now compare another balanced market, Madison, Wisconsin, which reaches the same label a completely different way.

Madison sits in the balanced band too, but for the opposite reason. Its price momentum is strong while affordability is stretched, the mirror image of Austin's cold-momentum-but-roomier profile. Two markets, the same label — and two completely different stories underneath. That's the whole point of reading the bars instead of just the headline number.

Look at the two Balanced columns as a pair. Seven points separate them and they carry the same label — but their floors are opposites. Madison's floor is affordability at 27, holding down a market whose price momentum runs 70. Austin is the mirror on those two axes: momentum is the cold side at 32, while affordability sits nearly twice as high at 51. (Austin's actual lowest bar is inventory health at 28 — under the method these scores used, a reading of loose supply, the other half of why the momentum went.) One label, two opposite engines, which is the whole reason to read the bars instead of the badge.

Now go run it on a market you actually care about.

P.S. The sixty seconds is real, but the badge is the part I would skip. Two markets can share a label and disagree about everything underneath it, and the bars take about ten seconds longer to read.

Methodology: temperature labels are cut from the overall Alpha Score (Hot Seller's 75+, Seller's 60–75, Balanced 40–60, Buyer's 25–40, Deep Buyer's under 25); the dimensions and their weights are on the methodology page. Figures are per Redfin (prices, supply), Census ACS (income, rent) and BLS (jobs, wages). Score cards and charts are snapshots as of the date each one states, not live reads.