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What are the five Alpha Score dimensions?

Price Momentum is the year-over-year change in the FHFA House Price Index. Inventory Health is new residential building permits from the Census Bureau. Both rest on a single public measure today, and each market page says so.

Affordability compares Census home values to incomes, with the mortgage payment at the current 30-year rate (Freddie Mac’s Primary Mortgage Market Survey®). Economic Strength uses unemployment and job growth from BLS, wage growth from BLS for metros, and QCEW wages for counties. Rental Yield is Census rent against Census home value. Sale prices, listings and rent growth from Redfin and Zillow still appear on market pages as context, but they do not feed the score. Each metric is defined on the methodology page.

The Score Breakdown on a market page: five dimension bars with their weights and a no-data marker
On a market page, the Score Breakdown shows each dimension’s 0–100 value and the weight it carried. The base weights are Inventory Health 25%; Price Momentum, Affordability and Economic Strength 20% each; Rental Yield 15% — but a dimension we cannot measure is left out and the rest are re-scaled to cover the whole score, so the weight shown for a given market can be higher than the base. A dimension with no data shows “—” and carries no weight.

Last updated 2026-10-10

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