Will Salt Lake City be a hot spot to buy a home in the new year?

Salt Lake City ranks among the nation’s 10 “Top Housing Hot Spots” for 2026, according to the National Association of Realtors.

The designation follows a year that saw many would-be buyers and sellers staying on the sidelines, hesitant to make a move due to the uncertainty over the impacts of President Donald Trump’s policies on the economy.

“In 2025, there was just a lot of, maybe, pent-up both excitement and uncertainty,” Utah Association of Realtors President-elect Aaron Drussel said. “We started off the year with higher interest rates than we’d seen in a while,” rising above the 7% mark in January.

With Trump returning for a second term, Drussel said “we weren’t sure what was going to happen going into 2025. Now, moving into 2026, we see interest rates are starting off a percent lower almost than they were a year ago.”

The average for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage was down to 6.15% for the week ending Dec. 31, the lowest level in 2025 and “an encouraging sign for potential homebuyers,” according to the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, better known as Freddie Mac.

The National Association of Realtors is predicting the rate will go lower, averaging 6% in 2026. That could help nearly 25,000 additional Utah households qualify to buy a median priced home that costs about $510,000, Drussel said.

While polls conducted last year in the U.S. and in Utah registered a sizable reluctance among consumers to make big purchases such as a new home or car, he believes Americans are learning to live with the ups and downs.

There’s more acceptance of the impacts of the president’s policies on the housing market, Drussel said, “whereas before, people didn’t know what to expect and they were kind of waiting to see what the next things were. But now, there’s kind of a normalcy.”

That should lead to increased confidence in market stability, he said, citing predictions that “prices will go up a little bit, not a huge amount. But with the decrease in interest rates, that’s going to cause more people to be able to buy. Which is great.”

Utah is in a unique position to benefit, Drussel said.

“The one thing that Utah has going for it, is it’s a really strong economy,” he said. “You have more people moving here than exiting the state, so there’s always an influx of people who like being here. There’s a family dynamic, it’s magnetic, pulling people in,” he said.

Net migration accounted for 43% of Utah’s population increase for the year that ended July 1, 2025, a decline to the state’s still “moderately high” pre-COVID-19 pandemic levels, a recent report from the University of Utah’s Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute found.

What adds to the state’s attractiveness as a place to live, Drussel said, is hosting a second Olympics, the 2034 Winter Games, as well as the multibillion-dollar redevelopment of downtown Salt Lake City and the west side.

“There’s a lot of larger-scale developments that are coming into play,” he said.

Here are the nation’s homebuying hot spots for 2026

Utah’s capital city and surrounding communities are described as a “young, fast growing, and rate sensitive area,” in the National Association of Realtors’ new report identifying markets with strong demand, projected improvements in affordability and increasing housing stock.

“Salt Lake City’s youthful demographics and improving inventory make it one of the biggest beneficiaries of lower rates in 2026,” the report noted, citing the nearly 25,000 additional households that would qualify for a median priced home if mortgage rates fall to 6% as forecast.

Others metropolitan areas that made the unranked Top 10 list:

• Charleston, South Carolina: “A fast-growing market”
• Charlotte, North Carolina and nearby parts of South Carolina: “A magnet for millennials and high skilled job growth”
• Columbus, Ohio: “Steady growth and high affordability”
• Indianapolis, Indiana: “Balanced, steady, and affordable”
• Jacksonville, Florida: “Where migration and inventory meet affordability”
• Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota and nearby parts of Wisconsin: “A market where lower rates unlock significant demand”
• Raleigh, North Carolina: “Strong improvements”
• Richmond, Virginia: “A stable market”
• Spokane, Washington: “A Western market with more opportunities in 2026″

A young population is seen as a key indicator of a top market “poised for new buyer opportunities” in the coming year, along with increases in incomes, jobs, new residents, rent costs compared to mortgages and building starts. Price cuts are also important.

Nadia Evangelou, the national association’s senior economist and director of real estate research, said the findings from the analysis of the nation’s larger metro areas show that the U.S. housing market is starting to rebalance.

“These (metros) aren’t necessarily the most talked-about areas, but they’re where buyers will finally see more openings and sellers can expect more activity as the market improves,” Evangelou said.

What’s happening with housing affordability in Utah

In Utah, Gov. Spencer Cox continues to push his goal of getting 35,000 new starter homes built in the state by the end of 2028, with starter condos now part of the effort to increase affordable housing options.

Fewer than 6,500 homes priced for first-time buyers have been delivered to market in the past two years according to a statewide housing dashboard. But Steve Waldrip, the governor’s housing adviser, said that number will probably end up closer to 10,000 through 2025.

“It’s very much a stretch goal,” Waldrip said, adding that the challenge is that policies put in place to encourage the construction of new homes can take several years to show results. The first starter condos in the program, for example, aren’t likely to be completed until 2027.

Cox was upbeat in a recent post on X, formerly known as Twitter. Touting his administration’s achievements on starter homes as well as energy development and permitting reform, the governor pledged, “We’re just getting started.“

Dejan Eskic, a senior fellow at the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute, said housing prices in the state rose some 2% over the past year, “which really, I’d say, is what’s below mild but not negative. A lot of that, you can whittle down to uncertainty in the economy.”

Eskic said even though interest rates on mortgage loans are lower than they were a year ago, there’s still an expectation among some that they’ll fall further in the coming months. He, however, isn’t predicting much movement.

“I don’t think they’ll go as much as people think they will just because there’s still the uncertainty of tariffs and we see with inflation that it’s not going away like we want it to,” Eskic said. “I don’t think things have gotten better on the uncertainty front.”

When it comes to affordability, Utahns likely won’t see much change in 2026, he said.

“That’s a direct impact of interest rates,” Eskic said, which rose significantly after the COVID-19 pandemic. Combined with increasing home prices, he said buyers today are paying more in interest every month than what their total payment would have been a few years ago.

The state is making progress towards the governor’s goal for more starter homes, Eskic said, albeit slowly.

“It’s moving,” he said. “The number on its own sounds like, ‘Oh, it’s not happening.’ When you put it in the context of all of challenges with high interest rates, construction prices being high, I’m actually surprised it’s that high, if I’m being honest.”