Methodology

The data, in one paragraph

HottestZip aggregates public property records — recorded deeds, mortgages, foreclosure filings, tax rolls — plus listing and vacancy statuses, across 33,642 US residential ZIP codes in 3,125 counties, covering all 50 states and Washington DC. Single-family homes only. The measurement window is the 12 months ending 2026-06-03 (with the prior 12 months for year-over-year comparisons), and this edition was compiled on 2026-07-05. Everything you see is a count or a simple ratio of two counts. No weighted scores, no modeled estimates, no “proprietary index.”

What counts as an investor purchase

A recorded purchase of a single-family home where the buyer is a corporate entity— an LLC or corporation. That's the whole definition.

It's deliberately conservative, and it has a known blind spot: plenty of investors buy in their personal name, and we don't count them, because from the public record alone a personal-name investor is indistinguishable from a family buying a home to live in. So treat every investor count on this site as a floor, not a ceiling. We'd rather publish an undercount we can defend than an estimate we can't.

Trust-owned properties are not counted as investor-owned — trusts are usually estates and family arrangements, not businesses.

The ranking rule, verbatim

Ranked ZIPs are ordered by investor purchases per 100 single-family homes over the 12-month window (ties broken by raw purchase count). To be ranked, a ZIP must clear all four bars:

• at least 500 single-family homes,
• at least 30 recorded sales in the window,
• at least 15 recorded investor purchases in the window,
• not a second-home market— over 65% absentee ownership usually means vacation and seasonal property, where corporate buying doesn't mean what “hot” means to a working investor.

6,912 of 33,642 ZIPs qualify in this edition. The median ranked ZIP saw 0.5investor purchases per 100 homes. ZIPs that don't qualify aren't hidden — every count we have is still on their pages, along with the specific reason they aren't ranked.

Markets: the same rule, one level up

“Markets” are the official Census metro and micro areas (March 2020 delineations), built by summing our county counts — so “Omaha metro” correctly includes Council Bluffs across the Iowa line. Markets are ranked by the same investor-purchases-per-100-homes yardstick, with year-over-year change computed from the prior 12-month window. To be ranked, a market must have:

• at least 10,000 single-family homes,
• at least 300 recorded sales,
• at least 50 recorded investor purchases, and
• not be a vacation market — excluded when the majority of its homes sit in ZIPs we already flag as second-home markets. We use the ZIP-flag rollup instead of a blunt market-wide absentee cutoff because a blunt cutoff mislabels working rental markets (Goldsboro NC) while the rollup correctly catches resort areas (Jackson Hole, Breckenridge, the Outer Banks).

591 of 927 markets qualify. Note the exclusion takes a majority: resort-adjacent markets like Key West or Sevierville can still rank, because most of their homes sit in ordinary residential ZIPs — the vacation ZIPs themselves stay flagged on their own pages, and you can weigh that as you see fit. The “markets near you” tool uses straight-line miles from your ZIP's center to each market's housing-weighted center — it's a distance sort, not a recommendation. Which market fits youdepends on your buy box, your capital, and your drive tolerance — the numbers inform that call; they don't make it.

Why “per 100 homes”

Raw purchase counts reward big ZIPs: 300 investor purchases in a 30,000-home ZIP is routine; 300 in a 6,000-home ZIP is a feeding frenzy. Dividing by housing stock puts a 4,000-home ZIP and a 20,000-home ZIP on the same scale. Both numbers are always shown, so you can weight them however you like.

Known limitations — the full list

• It's a snapshot. This edition covers the 12 months ending 2026-06-03 and was compiled 2026-07-05. It is not a live feed, and we won't pretend it is — every page carries these dates. If we publish a refreshed edition, the dates change with it.
• Recording lag.Counties take time to record deeds. We end the window about a month before the pull date so the last weeks aren't artificially thin, but very recent activity can still be underrepresented in some counties.
• Personal-name investors are invisible (see above). Floor, not ceiling.
• “Cash purchase” is a proxy. We count a sale as cash when no loan is currently recorded against the property. That misses cash buyers who took out a loan right after closing — so if anything, the cash count runs low. Directionally useful, not ground truth.
• A filing is not a sale. Distress-pipeline counts (pre-foreclosure filings, tax delinquency, vacancy) measure pressure on supply, not transactions. Most pre-foreclosures cure, refinance, or sell conventionally.
• Non-disclosure states.A handful of states (Texas and Missouri among them) don't require sale prices in the public record. Our counts don't depend on prices, but price-related context (like the “price-elevated” flag) can be thinner there.
• Small samples flagged, not ranked. 3,388 ZIPs with fewer than 20 single-family homes are shown as “too small to measure.” ZIPs under 30 recorded sales are shown with a low-sample warning and kept out of the rankings.

What the email unlocks — and why

The rankings (ZIPs and markets), every core count, the comparisons' headline rows, and this methodology are free with no email. The deeper cuts — the full ZIP report, the full market report, and the deep side-by-side comparison — cost one email address, which unlocks all of them everywhere on the site. That's the whole business model: useful counts in the open, deeper cuts for an email, and no phone number asked, ever.

Who's behind this

HottestZip is powered by GoForClose, a done-for-you direct mail service for real estate investors. Investors ask us “which ZIPs should I work?” constantly, and the honest starting point is where investors are already buying — so we published the counts. The tool works the same whether or not you ever talk to us. More on that on the about page.