MINNEAPOLIS (FOX 9) - A new survey from Zillow puts Minneapolis among the best cities for first-time home buyers for 2024.
Minneapolis ranks third, behind St. Louis and Detroit, for the best markets for buying your first home.
The ranking from Zillow uses four core factors:
- Rent affordability: share of income spent on rent
- Affordable available inventory on Zillow that the median household can afford (spending no more than 30% of income on the estimated monthly mortgage cost)
- The ratio of affordable for-sale inventory to renter households
- The share of households aged 29-43
Top 10 markets for first-time home buyers in 2024
- St. Louis
- Detroit
- Minneapolis
- Indianapolis
- Austin
- Pittsburgh
- San Antonio
- Birmingham
- Kansas City
- Baltimore
As always, you should take any business survey or rankings list with a grain of salt. Corporations use surveys and list rankings for publicity purposes.
Content marketing is a strategy where a company releases news-like articles or other media in specific interest areas to build trust with consumers.
Another concept, known as "thought leadership" marketing, uses the release of guides, surveys, or studies to cement a business' reputation and put forth the company as an expert in a subject area.
However, in our experience, many of these "studies" and "surveys" have little-to-no scientific rigor. For instance, Realtor.com released its own list of "best markets for first-time home buyers" and its list is completely different from the Zillow list. It's fair to note they use different criteria and the Zillow list only seems to include larger cities. Smart Asset also created its own list of 30 cities for new home buyers, which doesn't match up with the Zillow list.
Though, it's fair to note all three lists include a lot of Midwest, Rust Belt, and Texas cities.