A new report from Redfin reveals the most in-demand neighborhoods across the United States.

Redfin ranked U.S. ZIP codes in the 150 most populous metro areas using year-over-year growth in listing views on Redfin.com and a Redfin Compete Score — a measure of how hard it is to win a home in a specific area. The area is then rated on a scale of 0 to 100, where 100 is the most competitive.

Five of the hottest neighborhoods of 2025 are Midwest suburbs.

“People are seeking out neighborhoods that have access to city amenities through transit or nearby job opportunities, but they also want that suburban, small town charm,” Daryl Fairweather, Redfin Chief Economist, tells CNBC Make It.

“The South has been the desirable place in previous years because it’s more affordable on the coast, but insurance costs and property taxes have gone up. The Midwest, however, has stable insurance costs, stable property taxes and a stable housing market.”

The report used 2025 data from January 1 to February 28, with year-over-year data compared against the same timeframe in 2024. To rank on Redfin’s final list, a ZIP code had to have over 50 home sales and a Redfin Compete Score above 50. The ZIP codes on the list may include more than one neighborhood, town or village, and the report uses the neighborhood names that represent the area covered.

In each of the top 10 hottest neighborhoods, homes are selling quicker now than they did a year ago. Six of the 10 have a lack homes for sale and saw a drop in active listings from a year ago.

“It reflects strong demand. When there are more buyers, and there are sellers, homes sell quicker,” Fairweather says.

ZIP code: 11238

Brooklyn’s Prospect Heights-Clinton Hill area ranked number one, with a 105% spike in home sales from a year ago.

The median sale in the neighborhood is $1,397,000, which is up 3.9% year over year, according to Redfin.

“Prospect Heights being No. 1 speaks to how desirable it now is to be in proximity to a strong labor market like in New York, but it’s still Brooklyn,” Fairweather says. “It’s a bit more suburban than Manhattan. I think people are looking for that balance of having job opportunities, especially with return to the office, but still wanting more space.”

Prospect Heights and Clinton Hill offer a small-town charm in the middle of central Brooklyn, with a mix of new buildings and gorgeous old brownstones.

The area is home to the Brooklyn Museum and just a short walk to Prospect Park, the second-largest park in Brooklyn.

1. Prospect Heights and Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, N.Y.
2. Jenison, Mich.
3. Campton Hills and St. Charles, Ill.
4. Fairport, N.Y.
5. Polk Gulch and Russian Hill, Calif.
6. Great Kills, Staten Island, N.Y.
7. Franklin, Wis.
8. Prairie Village and Mission Hills, Kan.
9. Lakeville, Minn.
10. Bowie, Md.

Jenison, Michigan — ZIP code 49428 — is the the second-hottest U.S. neighborhood. The median sale price in the area was $356,500, which was down 0.2% year over year.

Fairweather says Jenison ranked No. 2 because of its affordability.

“The Midwest, in general, has been stronger this year because it is one of the few parts of the country that remains affordable,” she says. “Even given these high mortgage rates, a middle-class family can afford home ownership.”

Jenison, Michigan, is a suburb of Grand Rapids. It is less than 15 minutes from the city’s downtown and less than 30 minutes away from Lake Michigan.

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Spring is here and with it opportunities to make some extra cash.

Among the most in-demand side hustles on freelancer marketplace Taskrabbit right now are general furniture assembly, which pays an average of $41 per hour, TV mounting, which pays an average of $52 per hour and moving help, which pays an average of $47 per hour, according to the site.

But there are other, more season-specific ways to make money as well. Here are a few hustles experts recommend considering.

“Spring cleaning is so popular,” says Jen Glantz, founder of Bridesmaid for Hire and the creator of the Monday Pick-Me-Up and Odd Jobs newsletter. She adds that “anything to do with cleaning” could be lucrative, including the following three options:

• House cleaning, where people charge as much as $60 per hour on sites like Taskrabbit

• Home organizing, where experts who help create order in messy rooms charge as much as $150 per hour on Thumbtack

• Power washing, where cleaners use pressure washing machines to clean people’s home exteriors, decks, driveways and so on, and charge as much as $98 per hour on Taskrabbit

Both home cleaning and power washing include some upfront costs for equipment. Electric pressure washers sell for anywhere from $100 to $700 at Home Depot, for example. Cleaning supplies can include a vacuum, a mop, a bucket and various disinfecting products. Depending on where you and your clients live, you might also need a car. Do some research to see what people in your area are charging to make sure your price fits and can recoup your upfront costs.

You can post your services on marketplaces like Taskrabbit or Thumbtack, as well as “any type of local community marketplace, whether it’s local Facebook groups or the Nextdoor platform,” says Glantz.

You can also create flyers and post them on community bulletin boards or “create simple business cards on something like Canva and leave them in neighbors’ mailboxes, on their porch or door handle,” says side hustle expert Daniella Flores.

With the weather warming up, people will be spending more time outside, whether it’s for small gatherings or for big events. And those with outdoor spaces could benefit.

“If you have a beautiful outdoor space available,” says Flores, “such as a large backyard with a gazebo or anything aesthetically pleasing for the spring season, you can list your space on Giggster” for people to rent, they say. You can also try sites like Peerspace or Swimply.

One Los Angeles backyard is going for $50 per hour on Giggster, as is an Austin, Texas, backyard pool on Swimply. Note that both sites charge a fee to renters.

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In 2017, Sophie Hilaire graduated from The Wharton School with an MBA in Operations and moved to New York City to work as a consultant at McKinsey & Company. Before all of that, she was a Captain in the U.S. Army for six years.

“I grew up in the middle of nowhere Ohio, so to me, living in the city was a rite of passage,” she tells CNBC Make It. “It was great but I also felt like during the time I lived there, I was basically kind of a tourist.”

After a year of constant travel for work and spending only the weekends in her NYC apartment, Hilaire decided to take on a much different kind of challenge — climbing Mount Everest.

Hilaire already had experience climbing mountains like Mount McKinley in Alaska, Cotopaxi in the Andes Mountains and Chimborazo, the highest mountain in Ecuador.

She started training while still working full-time. When it came time for the climb, Hilaire was able to take advantage of the months-long sabbatical program offered at McKinsey.

“At the surface, I’ve always been drawn to lofty goals — ones that stretch the body and the spirit. I wanted to find out what would happen if I shut my laptop for two months and focused on this sole, raw experience while living in nature,” Hilaire says.

“When I did that, I had this epiphany that I wanted to spend more time in nature and Central Park to me wasn’t really the level of nature I needed.”

Hilaire returned from Nepal in the summer of 2019 and decided not to renew her lease.

“On the plane ride home, I knew I couldn’t go back to life in New York and that I had to be closer to nature,” she says. “That moment of knowing launched the next chapter — van life, homesteading, and loving myself. The mountain did transform me. She gave me direction and that’s been the real gift.”

Her job allowed Hilaire to be anywhere, so long as she was able to fly out to meet with clients around the country. That gave Hilaire flexibility to travel. But then the Covid-19 pandemic hit and Hilaire found herself without a home and without a clue of where she wanted to head to next.

“I thought, ‘I’m not ready to pay rent or buy a house, so why don’t I move into a sprinter van and continue to visit different places and see where I want to land?’” Hilaire says.

“I always knew I wanted to get a van just to have, but this kind of felt like a no-regrets move because I thought, ‘Why don’t I just get it now, so I don’t have to pay rent anywhere and I can keep on traveling?’ I didn’t know how long the pandemic was going to last.”

Hilaire purchased a Sprinter van she found on Craigslist for $29,900, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. The van had been partially built out already but still needed a lot of work. Hilaire added a bedroom area, bathroom, IKEA cabinets, solar panels, and a desk. She did most of the work herself and estimates she spent about $18,500 in renovations.

Hilaire traveled all across the United States while living and continuing to work full-time as a consultant.

Hilaire eventually quit her job at McKinsey & Company and lived the van life full-time for two years. But, in 2022, she decided it was time to settle down.

As a first step, Hilaire switched to boutique consulting which meant she wasn’t as client-facing and didn’t need to travel for work. She went from making around $300,000 a year at McKinsey, not including bonuses, to making significantly less — under $100,000. Hilaire says it didn’t bother her.

“I wanted to have my own trees and have somewhere to experience four seasons. I wanted to have a garden. I wanted to be grounded and I wanted to build a life with someone, too,” she says. “It was really nice because I got to spend all that time with myself and develop a relationship with myself for the first time.”

Next, Hilaire had to decide where she wanted to set down some roots. She thought about a homestead — a house, usually a farmhouse, with separate buildings on a big piece of land. Hilaire says she wanted a homestead to “learn more about self-reliance and just be connected to a piece of land,” but she wasn’t prepared to buy one just yet.

At the same time, her friends had been trying to convince her to move to Kentucky. The family owns a hunting property about an hour from their house where Hilaire could stay. The land was big enough for Hilaire to park her van, and she’d have free rein of the 16×40-foot Tuff Shed they bought from Home Depot for $23,000.

“I drove over there in my van and I was blown away by this place. I saw it probably at the worst time because it was the end of winter but I saw how beautiful it was,” Hilaire says.

Hilaire decided to stay and says it was the perfect situation because it would give her the ability to save to buy her own land one day. She set her sights on transforming the Tuff Shed into a tiny home that her friends could use even after she was gone.

“Huge houses did not appeal to me after living in my van. It just felt more comfortable to me and reasonable to have a smaller space,” she says.

The shed had two lofts, outside walls and subflooring and was being used to store random hunting items. Hilaire got to work renovating in the summer of 2022.

Hilaire says she spent roughly $53,535 transforming the shed into a living space inspired by the Sea Ranch community in California, an unincorporated community known for its timber-frame structures. She added skylights, a kitchen, open closets, several decks, a bathroom, a utility closet, and a bed with cardboard boxes underneath for storage.

Hilaire says her first night in the shed was quiet and restorative.

“It was exciting but it was also so relaxing and just really peaceful,” she says. “It was just so nice being in complete silence.”

Hilaire spent a year renovating the shed and lived there for five months before she moved to a homestead she owns with her now-husband.

“In some ways, it’s sad, but in other ways, it was a beautiful thing. That shed took me exactly where I wanted to go,” she says. “I didn’t want to be in this shed forever.”

When the Army vet first met her now husband, some of their dates included working on the shed’s renovations.

“It was important for me while we were dating to see if we could work together on projects. I wanted someone who didn’t necessarily need to be so great at it but we should have fun doing it,” Hilaire says. “We quickly realized that we found the one.”

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For many adults, becoming a parent is all-consuming. Familial obligations monopolize your attention and even the strongest, most long-term friendships can feel strained.

Ironically, those deep friendships we have in adulthood, the ones that take a backseat to family, are crucial contributing factors to raising resilient kids, journalist Jennifer Breheny Wallace said in a recent Ted Talk.

“A child’s resilience is rooted in the resilience of the adults in their lives,” she said. “Adult resilience is rooted on the depth and support in our relationships.”

Wallace authored “Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic – and What We Can Do About It” and the forthcoming “Mattering in the Modern World: A Solution to the Crises of our Time.”

A child witnessing you support a friend, or vice versa, shows them that part of resilience is creating a network where it’s OK to ask for help.

Wallace’s advice touches on a haunting reality about adult friendships: Americans have less of them than they’d like.

Less that one-third of adults ages 30 to 49 say they have five or more close friends, according to a 2023 survey by Pew Research Center. And in a 2023 University of Michigan poll, 34% of adults ages 50 to 80 say they feel isolated.

And it’s not just the quantity of positive social connections that’s lacking, it’s the quality: 40% of American adults said they are not as close with their friends as they would like, according to a recent PLUS ONE study.

When journalist Olga Khazan was deciding to have a child, one of her biggest concerns was how antisocial she was.

As an introvert, she often turned inward and stayed home rather than putting in the work to maintain relationships in the real world, an experience she outlines in her book “Me, But Better: The Science and Promise of Personality Change.”

“Being a parent just requires being ‘on’ all the time,” Khazan told CNBC Make It. “You kind of have to learn to be okay with being really active and socially engaged, even in a nonverbal way, a lot more than you’re used to.”

To prepare her for parenthood she wanted to increase her extroversion. She found that the most successful strategy for doing so was signing up for improv and sailing classes.

“I think the most effective thing is to sign up for an activity that occurs regularly with the same group of people,” she said. “It is hard to back out of because other people are relying on you.”

Though sailing was expensive and started much earlier in the morning than she preferred, the social interactions that came with showing up did improve her quality of life.

“You’re working on something, or thinking about something, and someone else in the boat will have had that exact experience and can really shed light on it,” she says.

Forcing herself to do things even when she didn’t feel like it made her less cranky and more agreeable while parenting. And being more comfortable talking to others about the challenges of child-rearing made the experience a bit less lonely.

“I am just not really a joiner naturally,” she says. “I never joined a group before this, but I think I learned that things like this, especially really hard things like motherhood, are so much easier when you have other people around going through something similar.”

Despite the proven benefits positive social relationships have on our well-being, American culture still doesn’t rank friendships as highly as romantic partnerships.

The only way to change this, Wallace said, is to actively prioritize friendships.

“We need one or two or three people in our lives who know us intimately. who can see when we are struggling and who will reach over and put that oxygen mask on for us,” she said. “This is a very different level of support than we normalize in our busy culture today.”

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Soft skills are hot skills, according to LinkedIn.

The career platform recently released its “Skills on the Rise 2025” report, which shows that people skills are becoming more in demand on the platform, so much so that Andrew McCaskill, a career expert at LinkedIn, says the “soft” moniker is becoming out-of-date.

“We do the skills a disservice by calling them ‘soft’ skills,” says McCaskill. “These human-centric skills are really game changers as it relates to how we think about the skills you’re going to need and work on a regular basis.”

In a rapidly evolving workplace post-Covid, seven of the top 10 skills in the study were soft skills — in part due to the proliferation of AI, which made up two spots in the top 10. Soft skills can be harder for AI to replicate, McCaskill says.

The study measured the number of LinkedIn users adding a skill to their profile, the share of members being hired who had a skill and the amount a skill was included in a job posting. It then compared those totals to the prior year.

LinkedIn’s top soft skills on the rise (and where they ranked on LinkedIn’s Skills on the Rise list):

1. Conflict mitigation (2nd)
2. Adaptability (3rd)
3. Innovative thinking (5th)
4. Public speaking (6th)
5. Solution-based selling (7th)
6. Customer engagement and support (8th)
7. Stakeholder management (9th)

Conflict mitigation was the top soft skill on the list, partially due to changing workplace dynamics. A recent study from the Harris Poll and Express Employment Professionals found that “toxic” behaviors in the office are increasing and 30% of employed U.S. job-seekers reported their colleagues as more confrontational than they were 3 years ago. McCaskill attributes this to a “divided external world,” a return to the office from Covid, and a generational divide.

“The people who can be calm in the midst of [those factors], the people who can keep their professionalism in the midst of that … those people are going to win in this,” McCaskill says.

For those who aren’t the most outgoing, having a workplace based around skills like public speaking could seem like a nightmare, but McCaskill says it’s more about conveying your soft skills in a way that best fits your personality.

“No one’s saying that you’re going to go out and be … shaking hands and kissing babies every day for the next six months,” McCaskill says. “But even if you are an introvert, you’ve got to figure out, ‘How can I communicate my enthusiasm?’”

That could be as simple as writing a thank-you note detailing your excitement about a role after an interview.

In terms of how you can show these soft skills in a job application or interview, McCaskill suggests having your soft skills on your resume and specific examples for interviews. He also says that it’s important to be able to recognize when a hiring manager is asking you about a soft skill.

“When somebody says, ‘Tell me about a time that you solved a problem that your company was facing,’ they’re really asking you about innovative thinking,” McCaskill says. “If my human skills are going to be a big part of these conversations, let me start to think about what the main ones are.”

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