About

Buy Des Moines is an independent guide to buying a home in the Des Moines, Iowa metro. It exists because the alternative — searching "West Des Moines vs Waukee" and landing on a brokerage page designed to capture your contact details — doesn't actually answer the question.

What this site is not

We are not a brokerage, we do not sell listings, we do not take referral fees from agents or lenders, and we do not collect your contact details. Nothing here is financial or real-estate advice. If you are making an offer on a specific house, you need a local agent, a lender, and an inspector — this site is for the stage before that, when you are still deciding where to look.

Where the numbers come from

Every figure on this site is pulled directly from a public source. Nothing is estimated, and nothing is written by hand into a page:

• Metro market data — median listing price, active listings and days on market come from Realtor.com's monthly metro series, published through FRED (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis) for the Des Moines–West Des Moines CBSA.
• Per-area home values, rents and market pace — Zillow Research: typical home value (ZHVI), typical rent (ZORI), for-sale inventory, days-to-pending and price-cut share.
• Income, homeownership and population — U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey, 5-year estimates.

Data refreshes automatically every Monday. The date it was last pulled is printed on the market page and on every area page, so you can always see how current it is.

What we do when data is missing

Zillow suppresses some series for smaller cities in some months. When that happens the figure is simply omitted rather than estimated or carried over from a previous month — so an absent number means we genuinely do not have it, not that nothing changed. Two of our twelve areas are missing days-to-pending this month for exactly this reason.

Limitations worth knowing

Metro figures reflect listing activity, not final sale prices. Area figures are typicals across a whole city — they say nothing about a specific street or house. School district boundaries change and frequently do not follow city limits, so always verify by address rather than by suburb. Commute times are general, not modelled.

Corrections and questions: hello@buydesmoines.com. If you find a number that looks wrong, please tell us — we would rather fix it.