ShouldISellYet.com answers one question for homeowners: is the market where my home sits turning against me? Enter a ZIP code and you get a plain-English reading — HOLD, WATCH, or ACT — computed from licensed market statistics, free, with no account. Paid products add the homeowner's own numbers (equity, walk-away proceeds, lock-in cost) and monthly alerts when their market shifts. It is operated by Yayday LLC and is not a brokerage; it does not list, sell, or value individual homes.
Free readings are live in thousands of U.S. ZIP codes. Every state and the District of Columbia has at least one. The rest aren't scored yet: those pages say so rather than showing a rating, because a page with no current reading shows no reading at all.
Readings first went live on 20 August 2026, computed from a licensed market-statistics API. Coverage grows ZIP by ZIP as each market's data clears the quality floor; the data sourcing is documented on the methodology page.
Figures on this page were taken on 22 August 2026. The running count is on the markets index, which computes it on every build. Each ZIP page shows the month its own reading runs through; a page with no reading shows no date.
Three signals, each drawn from licensed market statistics about homes currently listed for sale, and each with a published danger line. The thresholds are disclosed, not proprietary — the point is that anyone can check our work. The full method — including two commonly-quoted signals this engine deliberately does not use, and why — is on the methodology page.
Crossing a line scores points, and the points decide the word. A steeply falling price trend scores enough on its own to reach ACT, so an ACT does not imply that every line is crossed. Prices are measured on what sellers are asking; time on market is measured across listings that are still for sale, which is not the same thing as how long a sale takes. Every dial on the site discloses its source counts, its formula in words, and why its line sits where it does.
The same signals are read in the opposite direction too: a market with no lines crossed and all three strength conditions — asking prices up +5% or more, time on market down −20% or more, homes for sale down −15% or more — reads as a strong seller's market. The published vocabulary is three words, so that lands in the ACT band, qualified as a seller's market rather than as a warning.
A tool built to generate real-estate leads would find urgency everywhere. Ours doesn't: most live readings currently come back HOLD, which is the product working correctly. We are not publishing a national breakdown by rating on this page while coverage is still growing — a share computed over the first tranches of live ZIP codes is not a share of the country, and would be quoted as one.
We test the danger lines rather than assert them, replaying year-end signal snapshots against the federal government's own annual house-price index for the following year. A backtest of the current three-signal engine is being computed on exactly that basis and will be published, clearly labelled. Until it is, this page quotes no backtest figures — a number borrowed from any other formula would describe an engine the site does not run.
A reading is computed from licensed market statistics — ZIP-level data about homes currently listed for sale, bought under a commercial licence. It is not public data, and we would rather say that plainly than let a looser word imply a provenance we do not have. The provider is named plainly on the methodology page; we do not use its name as a marketing credential. This is the only source that feeds a reading.
Three further sources support the product without feeding any reading: the Federal Housing Finance Agency house price index (U.S. Government, public domain), used to test our danger lines and as an independent price benchmark; U.S. Census Bureau ZCTA and CBSA files (public domain), used to map ZIP codes to metropolitan areas; and the Freddie Mac Primary Mortgage Market Survey, which supplies the mortgage-rate context on paid reports. Place names come from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0). Those four are genuinely public; the market statistics are not.
No source sponsors, endorses, or partners with this site, and no source has any influence over a reading.
Freshness varies by ZIP code. Market data is licensed per ZIP and costs money to refresh, so the busiest ZIP codes refresh most often and the rest less often; the cadence on the new source is not settled yet, and we would rather not publish a schedule we cannot keep. Every page that shows a reading shows the month that reading's own data runs through.
Every month we publish the Warning-Sign Index — the share of scored U.S. ZIP markets showing warning signs, computed from fixed, published danger lines and charted back to 2012. Each release carries national, state and metro numbers, the ZIPs that crossed the danger line that month, and a one-paragraph local angle for every state. The index runs on a deliberately frozen basis so the series stays comparable month to month, which means it is not the same computation as a current ZIP reading; the methodology page documents the difference and the seam where the data source changed.
The data is downloadable and free to quote, chart, and cite ("Source: ShouldISellYet (shouldisellyet.com)") — state and metro CSVs, plus the full index history. Per-ZIP data is available on request for specific stories. Charts are published at 1200×675 with attribution already baked in, so they can run as-is. Redistributing the files as a dataset, or using them to build a competing data product or service, is not permitted; the full terms ship with each release as LICENSE.txt. Definitions, the FHFA backtest, restatement rules, and a versioned changelog live on the research methodology page; the index definition is fixed, and any change to it is versioned and restated rather than applied silently.
press@shouldisellyet.com
Happy to walk through the methodology, explain exactly what the licensed statistics do and do not measure, or pull the reading history for a specific market or region on request — custom cuts for coverage are free.