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 — inventory health. This is the leverage dial. The number underneath it is months of supply: under two months is a tight seller's market, four to six is balanced, and above six tilts to buyers. The Inventory Health bar is inverted on purpose: a high bar means supply is tight and sellers have leverage; a low bar means supply is loose and buyers have room.

Step 3 — momentum next to inventory. This pairing is where the read gets sharp. Rising prices on tight supply is a genuine seller's market with fuel in the tank. Rising prices on loosening supply is a market that has likely already peaked, with the price line simply not caught up to the inventory line yet. Always read the two together.

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 932 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. Amarillo at 65 is already unusual.

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 more than 20% off their 2022 peak) and supply has loosened, while a strong local economy and healthy rental yield prop the score up. 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. Madison and Austin are one point apart and carry the same label, and the same two numbers appear in both, 78 and 26, in swapped positions. Madison's 78 is price momentum and its 26 is affordability; Austin's 78 is rental yield and its 26 is momentum. One score, two opposite markets, 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.