These two figures illustrate the reality of two real estate markets in the United States.

A recent Zillow report showed that 550 U.S. cities have a median home price of $1 million. However, none of these cities are on Zillow's list of the 10 hottest housing markets for 2024. This disparity depicts the extent to which the U.S. housing market is a two-tiered system.

Americans on one track can afford to buy homes in $1 million zip codes or are locked into those zip codes through low-interest rate button-down loans. Americans on the other track, marginalized from the housing market before the pandemic, now find themselves even more adrift by high interest rates and a diminishing supply of affordable housing. The United States is becoming a nation of winners and losers in the real estate ownership equation.

Cities where the average home costs more than $1 million are nothing new. The reality is that most U.S. home buyers never imagined living in Malibu, California or Darien, Connecticut. They also never imagined that buying a home in a relatively upper-middle-class enclave that symbolizes the American dream would cost seven figures.

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California dominates this list with 210 cities with homes valued at $1 million. Most of these cities are located in the metropolitan areas surrounding Los Angeles or San Francisco, although the metropolitan areas of San Diego and San Jose are also represented. On the East Coast, the New York and Boston metropolitan areas account for the majority of the million-dollar markets, with Washington, D.C., and Miami, Florida, also experiencing million-dollar markets.

Ironically, many of the cities on the Million Dollar List and their surrounding metropolitan areas used to be cities that Americans moved to in order to make it big. Now, these cities are becoming the cities Americans are moving to, if they are successful. A million-dollar home costs twice as much as the median home price in the United States.

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Americans are moving to cities with lower costs of living and more affordable housing. The Sunbelt, which stretches from Florida to Arizona and north to the Carolinas, has been experiencing unprecedented population growth, and Zillow's top 10 list of the hottest U.S. real estate markets in 2024 shows that even frigid markets like Cleveland, Ohio, and Buffalo, N.Y., have emerged as destination cities for Americans looking for affordable housing opportunities.

It's worth noting that most of the cities on Zillow's list of the 10 hottest real estate markets have median home prices near or below the national average. In stark contrast, none of the $550 million cities made the list, making it difficult to ignore the fact that the U.S. real estate market is almost completely polarized.

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These two data points in this article illustrate the reality that there are two real estate markets in the U.S. originally appeared on Benzinga.com.

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