How the Hype Score™ works.
We publish what goes into the Hype Score™ because a momentum score you can't see inside of is just an opinion with a number on it. This page shows you exactly which signals we measure, how they rank in importance, where the data comes from, and what the score is not. We publish what goes in — the five factors and the order they matter in — not the secret sauce of how heavily each one weighs.
The score in 60 seconds.
The Hype Score™ is a 0–100 daily index of momentum on a US neighborhood. It blends five signals — composite strength, tourism demand, news sentiment, lifestyle, and 30-day trend — into one headline number, refreshed once a day.
What it is: a fast read on whether a neighborhood is heating up, cooling off, or holding. A triage tool to decide where to spend your due-diligence hours.
What it isn't: a property valuation, a price forecast, or a buy signal. A high score tells you a market has momentum, not that any specific deal in it pencils out. Underwriting is still yours.
Who it's for: US-based real estate investors comparing markets before they commit time. We cover 11,180 neighborhoods today.
Every score on the site has an "i" button next to it. That opens the breakdown modal, which shows the five factors, their relative contributions, and how complete the underlying data is. Nothing on this page is hidden behind that button — it's the same five factors, laid out in full.
The five factors.
The headline score is built from five factors. Four are numeric inputs scored 0–100 (sentiment is 0–1 internally and scaled up); the fifth, trend, is a directional adjustment. Each is visible in the breakdown modal as its own bar.
1. Composite
Plain English: the long-run baseline strength of the neighborhood — the signal we have the most history on. It's the anchor the other four factors move around.
How we measure it: a rolled-up index of the structural neighborhood attributes we track (the score_composite field). It changes slowly; it's the slowest-moving of the five.
Where the data comes from: our neighborhood enrichment pipeline.
Refresh: recomputed in the daily 02:00 UTC snapshot.
2. Tourism
Plain English: visitation and search demand for the area. High tourism pressure tends to lead short-term rental performance and pull retail and amenity investment.
How we measure it: a 0–100 tourism demand index (the score_tourism field).
Where the data comes from: visitation and search-demand signals in our enrichment pipeline.
Refresh: recomputed in the daily 02:00 UTC snapshot.
3. News sentiment
Plain English: the rolling tone of press mentions for the neighborhood. Are people writing about it positively, negatively, or not at all.
How we measure it: a sentiment value normalized to a 0–1 scale (the news_sentiment_score field), where 0.5 is neutral. It's the fastest-moving of the five signals — sentiment turns before structural data does.
Where the data comes from: sentiment analysis over press mentions.
Refresh: recomputed in the daily 02:00 UTC snapshot.
4. Lifestyle
Plain English: the amenity, walkability, and quality-of-place mix — the things that make a neighborhood somewhere people want to be.
How we measure it: a 0–100 lifestyle index (the score_lifestyle field).
Where the data comes from: amenity and walkability signals in our enrichment pipeline.
Refresh: recomputed in the daily 02:00 UTC snapshot.
5. Trend
Plain English: which direction the neighborhood has been moving over the last 30 days — rising, steady, or falling. This is the only factor that can pull the score down.
How we measure it: a directional classification (rising, falling, or steady) applied as a fixed adjustment, not a weighted multiply. Rising nudges the score up, steady leaves it roughly flat, and falling pulls it down — and the adjustment is capped so it can tilt a score but never dominate the core factors.
Where the data comes from: the 30-day movement of the neighborhood's own signals.
Refresh: recomputed in the daily 02:00 UTC snapshot.
The formula.
HypeCity publishes what goes into the Hype Score™ and the order the factors matter in — but not the exact multipliers. That mirrors how index methodologies are normally disclosed: Mashvisor, Zillow, Bloomberg, and S&P all publish the factors that feed an index without handing over the precise weighting. The factors are the transparency; the exact weights are the one piece we keep in-house, so the score stays a research signal rather than a turnkey, reproducible trading formula.
How we weight the factors
The four core factors combine in a fixed order of importance, with trend applied on top as a directional adjustment:
- Composite carries the heaviest weight — it's the structural anchor the score is built around.
- Tourism is the secondary factor — demand pressure that tends to lead amenity and rental investment.
- News sentiment sits in the middle of the ladder, but it's the fastest-moving input — it turns before the structural factors do, so it's often what moves a score from one day to the next.
- Lifestyle is the lightest of the four core factors — it shifts slowly and rarely swings a score on its own.
- Trend isn't a weighted factor at all. It's a capped directional adjustment — rising nudges a score up, steady leaves it roughly flat, falling pulls it down — sized so it can tilt a score but never dominate the core four.
What happens when a factor is missing
The weighting above assumes all five readings exist. They don't always — see the next section. When a factor is genuinely missing for a neighborhood on a given day, we surface that gap rather than guessing at it.
Signal coverage.
Not every neighborhood has every signal every day. So next to each score we show a signal-coverage chip — for example, 4/5 signals — that tells you how much of the underlying data is actually populated. A 5/5 score is backed by all five inputs; a 3/5 score is real but thinner.
Why this matters. Earlier in development, a missing factor was being silently backfilled with a neutral default (composite 75, tourism 70, sentiment 0.7, lifestyle 70). That produced a "phantom" score of about 70 for neighborhoods we had almost no real data on — a number that looked like a reading but wasn't one. We caught it in an internal audit and changed the behavior.
What you see now (Direction A — show the gap, don't fake it). In the breakdown modal, a factor we have no reading for renders as a dashed "no data" bar, and the modal says so in words. We never paint a solid bar over an empty input. The signal-coverage chip is the honest one-line summary of how thick the data is behind any given score.
How coverage gates Pulse. The Pulse layer on /market-pulse only reports a 24-hour move when both ends of that 24-hour window clear a coverage floor — so the deltas you act on are backed by enough real data to mean something, not noise from a default flipping to a real value. Across the catalogue, average coverage is currently 0.41, which is why a meaningful share of neighborhoods don't surface a Pulse delta yet. That's a data-coverage gap we're actively closing, not a scoring error — see the roadmap below.
How often it refreshes.
The Hype Score™ refreshes once daily in a snapshot job that runs at 02:00 UTC. That timing is deliberate: it sits after the prior day's data enrichment has settled and before the day's downstream jobs run, so each snapshot captures one clean, consistent state per neighborhood per day.
Deltas are computed on read. We don't pre-bake the day-over-day change. When you load /market-pulse, the Pulse delta for a tracked neighborhood is computed live, comparing today's snapshot against the snapshot from roughly 24 hours earlier. That's why a neighborhood you tracked for the first time today won't show a delta — there's no prior snapshot to subtract from yet. The delta appears on day two. We'd rather show nothing than fake a "held steady" line.
What we don't do.
The Hype Score™ is research and information. To be precise about its limits:
- It is not investment, legal, or tax advice. We don't recommend properties and we don't tell you what to buy. Every page carries the same line: Research and information only — not investment, legal, or tax advice.
- It is not a real estate appraisal or valuation. The score is a momentum index across five signals. It does not estimate a property's market value, and it is not a substitute for a licensed appraisal.
- It is not real-time market data. Scores refresh once a day at 02:00 UTC. Intraday moves, new listings, and breaking events are not reflected until the next snapshot.
- It is not a guarantee or a forecast. A rising score reflects past and present momentum across our signals. It does not predict future prices, rents, or returns, and momentum can reverse.
- It is only as complete as the data behind it. A score with partial signal coverage is a thinner read, which is exactly why we show the coverage chip and the "no data" bars instead of hiding the gaps.
Use it to decide where to look. The underwriting, the comps, and the decision stay with you.
How we'll improve.
The current five-factor v3 model is the foundation, not the finish line. Items below are clearly split into what's live today and what's on the roadmap — we don't bill roadmap as capability.
Live today
- The full five-factor v3 model, with every factor disclosed on this page.
- The breakdown modal with per-factor contributions and honest "no data" bars.
- Daily 02:00 UTC snapshots with day-over-day Pulse deltas computed on read.
- The signal-coverage chip on every score.
Roadmap (not yet live)
- More signals. We plan to expand well beyond the current five inputs, layering in additional structural, market, and demand signals so coverage gets both broader and deeper.
- Source-quality scoring. Weighting each input not just by what it measures but by how fresh and how trustworthy that day's reading is, so a stale or thin source counts for less.
- Coverage backfill. Closing the current coverage gap (catalogue average 0.41 today) by backfilling the highest-traffic US neighborhoods first, so more neighborhoods surface a Pulse delta you can trust.
We'll update this page whenever the weighting or the factor set changes. The methodology you see here always describes the model running in production.
Related: Scoring disclaimer · Terms
Deeper reads: Investment Signal · Confidence Engine · Climate Score · Persona Fit · Cap Rate