I wanted to walk you through what Realtor.com Research just published about the nation's hottest housing markets in June, because it really tells us something important about the two different Americas we're living in right now when it comes to real estate. Hartford, Connecticut is sitting at the top of the list for the second straight month, and the reason is pretty straightforward: it's affordable relative to Boston and New York, but close enough that people can still make it work. The median listing price there is around $480,000, compared to over $790,000 in both of those bigger metros. That gap is driving serious competition for Hartford properties, with nearly 4.5 times the national average of viewers looking at each listing.
What's really interesting is the pattern emerging across the Northeast. According to Realtor.com, there are five markets in that region that have basically dominated the hotness rankings for the past four and a half years straight. We're talking about Hartford, Manchester-Nashua in New Hampshire, Springfield in Massachusetts, Rochester in New York, and Worcester in Massachusetts. All of them share something in common: they're mid-size cities sitting in the shadow of much pricier major metros, and none of them have had building booms that could really increase their housing supply. So what that means is that prices have kept climbing dramatically even as the rest of the country has cooled off.
Now here's where it gets really telling. Since June 2022, prices in these Northeast markets have jumped substantially higher, even while the national average actually fell. Rochester prices went up 43 percent, Hartford up 26 percent, and the others in that similar range. Homes are taking a little longer to sell than they did at the absolute peak of the frenzy, but we're still talking 27 to 35 days, which is well above the national norm. The key thing, though, is that sellers in these markets are still holding all the cards. The share of listings getting price cuts hasn't really changed from four years ago, and in some cases it's actually gone down. That tells you that even with some slowdown in velocity, buyers haven't gained any real negotiating power.
The flip side of this story is the pandemic boom towns that completely cratered. Places like Colorado Springs, Idaho Falls, Columbus, and Topeka were absolutely on fire back in 2021 when people were fleeing to cheaper, more remote-friendly markets. But according to Realtor.com's data, those markets have fallen out of the national top 30 entirely. Colorado Springs is a perfect example: inventory quintupled, days on market went from 9 days to 50, and prices actually dropped below their 2022 peak. The same pattern played out in Idaho Falls with even starker numbers. What happened is that supply finally caught up with demand in these markets once the initial migration wave faded and new construction came online.
What I'm seeing locally in the Bay Area and East Bay through all this is validation of what we already know. We're in a supply-constrained region much like those Northeast markets, and that structural shortage is going to keep supporting seller leverage for as long as it exists. The difference between what's happening in Hartford and what happened in Colorado Springs really comes down to one thing: the ability to build. In the markets where supply could eventually increase, normalcy returned pretty quickly. In markets where you can't build your way out of the problem, like ours, buyer leverage stays limited no matter what else is happening in the broader economy. That's the reality we're working with out here.
