Compare Des Moines metro areas

How to read this comparison

Pick two areas and the tool lines them up on eight measures. Each pair of bars is scaled to the larger of the two values in that row, so a bar tells you which area is higher and roughly by how much, but bar lengths in different rows should never be compared with each other. "Table view" shows the same numbers as plain figures. A dash means the source did not publish that number for that area this month. We leave it blank rather than estimate it.

What each measure is

• Typical home value is Zillow's Home Value Index for the city: a smoothed, seasonally adjusted estimate for single-family homes and condos in the middle price tier (the 33rd to 67th percentile). It is not an average of recent sale prices, and not the value of any one house. The "value, past year" figure is the change from the same series twelve months earlier.
• Typical rent is Zillow's Observed Rent Index: a smoothed, seasonally adjusted monthly rent covering single-family homes, condos and apartment buildings. It mixes housing types that the home-value figure does not, so do not divide one by the other and treat the result as a rule.
• Homes for sale, median days to pending and listings with price cuts are Zillow's market-activity series for single-family homes and condos. Days to pending is how long a typical listing took to go under contract; price cuts is the share of listings that have had one. More listings, slower sales and more price cuts describe a market where buyers have more room, but no single month settles that.
• Median household income, homeownership and population come from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey, using the 2024 5-year estimates for each city. These are survey estimates pooled over five years, so they trail the market data and carry a margin of error, which matters most for the smaller cities.

The "What the numbers say" notes

The sentences under the bars are written by rules, not by a person. They call prices "within a few percent" when the two values are less than 3% apart, mention income only when the gap is 10% or more, and mention size only when one city is at least 25% larger. If either area lacks a number, the sentence for it does not appear.

Dates and limits

The Zillow figures are for September 2026. They were last pulled in November 2026, and the site refreshes them weekly. Each area is a city as the source defines it, matched by name within Iowa, so a suburb's school district, neighborhoods and commute are not captured. The tool describes how areas differ today. It does not forecast prices and is not advice to buy or sell anywhere. For a specific house, talk to a local agent, a lender and an inspector.