Top 20 US places where homes sell fastest

When the time comes to put your home on the market, a host of questions need to be answered. The most pressing question is, “How long will my house take to sell?”

This is also an interesting talking point from a home buyer’s perspective. It’s important to know how much time you’ve got to put an offer in on your dream property before it’s snapped up by someone else.

The key statistic that matters in this context is Days on Market (DOM), which is the average time between a home being advertised and an offer being accepted.

Just as house prices vary from place to place, DOM averages differ greatly depending on where you’re looking to buy or where you’re planning to sell.

Peek beneath the surface, and there’s even more interesting data to dissect. Because while you might expect that the fastest-moving markets would be those with the highest total sales volume each month, that’s rarely the case.

Clearly, there's a lot to discuss, so if you're keen to understand where homes sell fastest and why, strap in as Offerpad discusses the figures and explanations behind this aspect of the housing market.

DOM Data and Methodology Explained

The data used is sourced from Redfin, covering sales that occurred between January 1 and May 31, 2025. The DOM figures are averages for a given city, region, or state. So while some houses may have sold quicker and some slower, Offerpad is looking at the mean.

It’s also important to note that this data set excludes any places with fewer than 500 home sales recorded within the allotted time period. This is essentially a measure to exclude any anomalous information from statistical outliers, which aren’t reflective of broader trends and are therefore not particularly useful for the vast majority of buyers and sellers.

Read on for an overview of the 20 places where homes sell fastest, first dealing with the 10 quickest-moving state-level markets, then the 10 cities with the lowest average DOM figures in the first half of 2025.

Top 10 States Where Homes Sell Fastest

Without further ado, here’s a roundup of the states where homes are listed and sold in the shortest amount of time on average:

1. Massachusetts – 26.4 DOM – 21,380 Homes Sold
2. Washington – 27.6 DOM – 33,659 Homes Sold
3. Nebraska – 31.4 DOM - 7,864 Homes Sold
4. Kansas – 31.8 DOM - 12,180 Homes Sold
5. Rhode Island – 32.2 DOM – 3910 Homes Sold
6. Alaska – 32.2 DOM – 2544 Homes Sold
7. Virginia – 33 DOM - 42,267 Homes Sold
8. Michigan – 35.6 DOM - 42,550 Homes Sold
9. Indiana – 36.2 DOM - 31,253 Homes Sold
10. Maryland – 36.4 DOM - 25,057 Homes Sold

The top two spots, held by Massachusetts and Washington, are not necessarily that surprising. Both had total sales volumes that matched their large populations and economic significance. In fact, Massachusetts was recently recognized as a national leader for its economic clout. Like Washington, it's a hub for education and tech, so you'd expect to see a high demand for housing, reflected in low average DOM.

What's more interesting is the absence of some big-hitters. California, which has the fourth largest economy on the world stage, is outside of this top 10, and New York doesn't quite make it into the top 20 states where homes sell fastest. Instead, there are smaller states with lower sales volumes, such as Rhode Island and Alaska, which sit higher up than their much larger counterparts.

The reasons behind this trend are discussed in more detail below, but for now, it’s essential to know that states with the highest number of homes sold in 2025 are not always those with the swiftest overall markets. California alone saw 108,466 homes change hands this year, yet its average DOM of 37.8 means most owners were waiting well over a month before their listings turned into an acceptable offer from a buyer.

Top 10 Cities/Regions Where Homes Sell Fastest

This is where even more intriguing details about the state of the housing market come to light, as there’s an obvious disconnect between the picture painted by the DOM data at the state level and how things appear in specific cities, counties, or metropolitan areas.

Before any analysis, here’s the list of the 10 fastest-moving local-level housing markets:

1. Monroe County, NY – 10 DOM – 2,420 Homes Sold
2. Lancaster County, PA – 10.2 DOM – 1,953 Homes Sold
3. Lancaster, PA Metro Area - 10.2 DOM – 1,940 Homes Sold
4. Bellevue, WA - 10.2 DOM – 577 Homes Sold
5. Rochester, NY Metro Area – 10.8 DOM – 3,271 Homes Sold
6. Berks County, PA – 11.6 DOM – 1,540 Homes Sold
7. Reading, PA Metro Area – 11.6 DOM – 1,540 Homes Sold
8. Cumberland County, PA - 13.4 DOM – 1,065 Homes Sold
9. Grand Rapids, MI – 13.8 DOM – 941 Homes Sold
10. Lehigh County, PA – 14.2 DOM – 1,279 Homes Sold

Again, the cities, counties, or regions with the shortest average gap between a home being put up for sale and a buyer having their offer accepted by the seller are not those with the largest total volume of sales.

Monroe County, NY, holds the top spot, excluding its most populous city, Rochester, which also ranks in the top 10.

This is a far cry from New York, NY, which saw 12,319 homes sold this year so far, but which has an average DOM of 66.2. So, selling a house in the Big Apple takes over six times as long as doing so in the comparatively sleepy Monroe County.

Once again, large, heavily populated urban areas in other states are conspicuous by their absence from the top 10. There were 7,395 home sales in Los Angeles, CA, between January 1 and May 31, 2025. On average, homes in the city sat on the market for 54.2 days during this time.

The Austin, TX Metro Area was even more sluggish. The typical DOM was 72.4 across a total of 11,922 homes sold year-to-date. This trend was consistent across all of Texas’ largest city regions, including Dallas and Houston.

All in all, it’s not unreasonable to feel quite surprised by all of these statistics. So, what’s going on and why should you care?

Lessons from the Contrast Between DOM and Sales Volumes

The clearest conclusion drawn from the data is that there are some seriously competitive housing markets in smaller states and regions, meaning that there’s little to no correlation between the number of properties changing hands and the number of days each home stays on the market. In fact, there’s arguably an inverse correlation in some cases, with the nation's largest and most heavily populated areas, such as California and Texas, having some of the highest average DOM figures.

Of course, there are exceptions to this. The Seattle, WA metro area ranks 13th in average days on the market, with 14.8. Meanwhile, its sales volumes of 13,365 also make it the 20th largest market overall.

Likewise, Santa Clara County, CA, shares the same DOM average as Seattle, as it is home to Silicon Valley and has a median home sale price of $1.7 million, up from $1.59 million last year. That's significantly higher than Seattle's $893,000 average, and a lot more than Monroe County, NY's $258,900 average.

Of course, the tech powerhouses of Seattle and Silicon Valley don’t tell us much about the wider reality of the housing market at the moment. For the majority of buyers and sellers, it’s clear that the amount of market activity, as extrapolated from the DOM average, is more useful as a means of judging competitiveness than simply looking at population figures and sales volumes.

The question that remains is, why is this useful? Well, there are a couple of good reasons:

Knowing When to Act

There are some places where homes sell fast, and others where they are likely to sit unsold for several months. With this information to hand, you can make informed decisions about how to act as a buyer or as a seller.

So, for instance, if you’re looking to buy a home in a market like Monroe County, NY, where most properties are sold a little over a week after being listed, you need to act fast. Also, you have to be prepared to outbid other prospective buyers in order to secure your dream home. Having all of your ducks in a row before you start looking to buy a house in this type of competitive market is a must, or you’ll end up missing out.

Likewise, if you’re aiming to sell your home, don’t just assume that it will be snapped up swiftly because you live in a big city with a large population. There might be plenty of potential buyers in places like NYC and Los Angeles, but there are a similarly large number of sellers. As such, you have to bed in for the long haul, accept that you might not get an offer you’re happy with for several weeks, and do what you can to improve the saleability of your home in other ways, such as boosting kerb appeal and carrying out interior improvements.

Knowing How to Deal with Realtors

Another key takeaway from examining average DOM and sales volumes is that this information gives you a stronger negotiating position when dealing with real estate agents.

For buyers, you’ll have an understanding of when a realtor is being honest about how sought-after a home is, and how quickly you’ll need to act to secure it. It’s much less stressful to deal with some of the potential high-pressure sales tactics when you’ve got hard data to hand.

For sellers, it’s a lifeline in terms of recognizing when agents you’re going to list with are being honest about how quickly they’ll be able to sell your home. Just because they can boast high sales volumes does not mean that the DOM will be that impressive, as we’ve shown.

Wrapping Up

The 20 places where homes sell fastest are a mixed bag, and are always changing, so it’s your duty to understand things like the average DOM and the sales volumes in the states, cities, and regions you’re buying or selling in.

Thankfully, it doesn’t require much research to gather empowering information about region-specific real estate markets, whether they’re fast-paced and competitive or a little more laid-back.

Most importantly, the size and profile of a place do not typically have a direct correlation with the competitiveness of the housing market. Outside of a handful of exceptions like Seattle, it’s the mid-size locations that have the biggest potential to surprise you.

This story was produced by Offerpad and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.