Just how hot is Salt Lake’s housing market?

The Salt Lake housing market has zoomed on to the list of the nation’s Top 10 hottest for 2025, according to Zillow.

Utah’s capital and the surrounding metropolitan area “just made the list at No. 10,” the country’s most-visited real estate website declared, calling Salt Lake “one of the fastest-rising metros in our ranking, moving up 18 spots from last year,” with home values forecast to rise 2.3% this year.

Salt Lake, ranked the 18th hottest housing market for 2024, was the only Western metropolitan area to make this year’s Top 10, after the West was shut out completely from last year’s list. It was only one of two Western metropolitan areas on the Top 20 list for 2025, joined by San Diego at No. 19.

Buffalo, New York, topped the real estate company’s predictions for this year’s 10 hottest housing markets. Buffalo also was ranked No. 1 in 2024 and is the first market to lead the list in back-to-back years, thanks to what Zillow cited as “relative affordability and supply that trails demand.”

Zillow looked at the housing market in Salt Lake and the nation’s top 50 metropolitan areas by population to come up with this year’s rankings, analyzing forecasted home value growth, how quickly homes are selling, and projected growth in jobs, housing construction and home ownership.

Here’s the Top 10 housing market list:

1. Buffalo, New York
2. Indianapolis, Indiana
3. Providence, Rhode Island
4. Hartford, Connecticut
5. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
6. St. Louis, Missouri
7. Charlotte, North Carolina
8. Kansas City, Missouri
9. Richmond, Virginia
10. Salt Lake City, Utah

At the same time that the Salt Lake housing market is being seen as red-hot, Utah is also ranked as the nation’s third-least affordable state for homebuyers by Tradingpedia. Only Hawaii and California have higher home price to income ratios, the measures used by the financial news website.

“Interestingly, Utah emerges as the third-most expensive state for buying a home, with the median home sales price at the end of November 2024 at $545,555. Coupled with а personal income of $67,095 a year, the prices of residential real estate here are unaffordable for many,” Tradingpedia said in a news release.

According to the website’s analysis, homes in Utah cost on average more than eight times the state’s annual personal per capita income, calculated at $67,095 in the third quarter of 2024. Despite Utah’s 2024 median home price of $545,555, the news release noted “34,374 homes were sold between January and December of 2024, which is roughly 9.8 sales per 1,000 residents.”

Unlike the list of hottest housing markets, Utah has plenty of company from other Western states on the least-affordable housing list. Montana is ranked fourth followed by Idaho, Washington, Colorado, and Oregon, with Arizona in 10th place. At No. 9, Rhode Island is the only non-Western state on the list.

Tradingpedia’s analysis showed “homes in the states with the highest home price-to-income ratio, predominantly in the West, are far beyond the means of most Americans, including the ones residing within them,” while the most affordable housing could be found largely in the Midwest, with Iowa at the top of that list.

Read more from Lisa Riley Roche.