Every quarter, The Business Journals ranks the country's hottest housing markets by ZIP code, using listing and sales data from Intercontinental Exchange. It's not a list of the priciest or most popular places. It measures momentum — how the listings-to-sales ratio, average list price, average sale price and days on market have moved quarter to quarter, year over year, and across five years. To even qualify, a ZIP code needs complete data, an average sale price of at least $425,000, and at least 10 sales in the quarter.
For the second quarter of 2026, the hottest ZIP code in the country was 96766 — Lihue, on Kauaʻi. Over the past five years, sale-price momentum there climbed 116.3%. The rest of the top 20 is a mix you wouldn't expect: Tampa, Hartford, a shore town in New Jersey, small towns in Wisconsin and Michigan. No other Hawaiʻi ZIP code made the list.
The Gap Between the Ask and the Close
Here's the line in the data that stopped me. In Lihue, the average list price for the second quarter was $1.82 million. The average sale price was $1.06 million.
Those aren't the same houses, so it's not a 40% haircut on every deal. What a spread like that usually means is that the expensive listings are sitting while the middle of the market keeps trading. Ambitious asking prices pile up at the top, and the closings happen well underneath them.
If that sounds familiar, it should. We see the same split here. The well-priced house in Kailua or ʻEwa Beach that goes in two weeks, and the one three streets over that's been sitting since spring because the price got set off a neighbor's 2022 sale.
"Falling Prices" Depends Which Map You're Reading
Nationally, the median asking price in June was $430,000, about 2.5% below the $440,950 average a year earlier. That's eight straight months of year-over-year declines and the largest drop since Realtor.com started tracking the number in 2017.
Break it apart by region and it stops being one story:
- Asking prices are down 7.3% in the West
- Down 3.5% in the South
- Up 10% in the Midwest
- Up 12.6% in the Northeast
Since prices peaked in June 2022, 28 of the 50 largest metros have come down and 22 have gone up. The market has splintered.
Hawaiʻi sits in the West column on those spreadsheets, and that's about where the resemblance ends. Phoenix and Boise can answer demand by building outward. We can't. Our supply is capped by shoreline, ag land, elevation, and a permitting process measured in years. Which is why a national average tells you very little about what your street is doing.
Slower, Not Soft
The national average time on market dropped from 99 days in the first quarter to 87 in the second, and both listings and pending sales ticked up from the quarter before.
Realtor.com senior economist Jake Krimmel described June as unremarkable in the best possible way. Mortgage rates held near 6.5%, inflation came in about where everyone expected, the labor market steadied, and the Fed left rates alone. After a rough start to the year, boring counted as good news. He credited the price settling to sellers getting realistic.
One agent quoted in the piece put it plainly: on paper it's still a seller's market, but it feels much more balanced than it did a few years back. Buyers have choices, and they're taking their time using them.
That tracks with what we see here. Buyers on Oʻahu aren't just running the mortgage math. They're adding up maintenance fees, the HECO bill, insurance that keeps climbing, and the drive from wherever they can actually afford to wherever they work. Nobody's rushing, and honestly, nobody should.
So a Kauaʻi ZIP code beat out every market on the mainland this quarter. Fun headline. The more useful part is what sits underneath it: momentum in Hawaiʻi runs on its own clock, and the gap between what sellers ask and what buyers pay is where the real conversation happens. That's been true here for a long time. It's just showing up in the national data now.
