Auburn, IN

At the June 30, 2026 Zillow reading, Auburn, IN is a 43,807-person market whose current signals do not settle the rental decision. Zillow supplies a present asking-rent and home-value view; Census, HUD, BLS, Census Building Permits, Redfin, IRS, HMDA, and FEMA cover different parts of the picture. The central question is whether today’s rent-to-value relationship remains interpretable when employment, sale-market, migration, mortgage-occupancy, and hazard evidence are considered separately. Zillow’s trailing-12-month rent change is unavailable; Zillow does not publish enough rent history for that calculation. Therefore this report assigns no score and no rank. It instead identifies what the supplied measures establish and what a decision record still needs to test.

Zillow’s home-value index places the market at $259,349 on June 30, 2026, with a 6.52% year-over-year value change. Its asking-rent index is $963 on the same date, and the supplied gross-yield measure is 4.45%. These are useful current economics, but they have different meanings: Zillow’s value index describes a market-level value measure, while its asking-rent index captures advertised rent conditions. The gross-yield figure pairs current rent and value; it is not an operating-income measure because this packet supplies no expense data. The positive value change may appear firm beside the yield reading, yet it cannot be converted into a rental-growth conclusion. With the Zillow 12-month rent change unavailable, current rent is a level, not evidence of how rents moved over that interval.

Income and benchmark evidence set a boundary rather than a conclusion. Census ACS reports median household income of $74,331, alongside supplied market ratios of .1554 for rent to income and 3.49 for price to income. HUD’s FY2026 two-bedroom Fair Market Rent is $960. Zillow’s $963 asking-rent index is $3 higher, a calculation from those two figures, and the supplied rent-versus-FMR ratio is 1.003. Census ACS measures household income; HUD supplies a Fair Market Rent benchmark; Zillow tracks asking rent. None establishes the bill paid by a particular household or shows that the Zillow index and the HUD benchmark represent identical unit mixes. The near match is therefore a useful affordability boundary, not a verified affordability outcome, lease-rate distribution, or evidence that all two-bedroom rentals transact at either level.

Labor, construction, and resale data add a separate set of tensions. BLS LAUS reports market labor change of -0.62% over the 12 months through May 2026. The Census Building Permits Survey, which tracks newly permitted housing supply rather than completed or occupied units, records 114 total permits in 2026 year to date through M06, a zero value for the supplied 5+ permit measure, and 2.6 permits per 1,000 residents. Redfin’s May 1, 2026 for-sale snapshot reports 1.2 months of supply versus 1.5 previously, median days on market of 22 versus 25, a sale-to-list ratio of .9851, and price drops of .3582 versus .2809. Shorter listed supply and quicker market time sit alongside a higher share of listings with price reductions. That is a meaningful tension between tightness-oriented resale indicators and listing-price behavior, while the job decline and permit counts add distinct labor and pipeline context. The sources do not show whether permits become completed units or attribute any Redfin movement to jobs or construction.

Demand measures are also mixed in scope. IRS county-to-county tax-return migration aggregated to the market lists 1,244 moved in and 1,181 moved out, yielding supplied net migration of 63. The associated incoming AGI is $55,010 and outgoing AGI is $48,736, a supplied $6,274 gap. This movement evidence does not say whether movers rent or buy, or whether a tax-return migration count corresponds to a housing household. HMDA adds a different 2024 lens: it records 584 purchase mortgages, including 18 investor purchases, for an investor share of .0308. HMDA is purchase-mortgage occupancy evidence, not a census of all purchases, cash transactions, landlords, or rental demand. Positive net migration and a measured investor share therefore broaden the demand record, but neither resolves the missing Zillow rent history or establishes who occupies added or traded housing.

Risk sits outside the rent and resale measures. FEMA’s National Risk Index identifies inland flood as the top hazard, classified as water, with a risk score of 41.3 and a climate loss ratio of .001011. FEMA’s expected-annual-loss evidence is market-level risk context; it does not state parcel exposure, policy terms, loss experience for a given home, or an insurance premium. The available housing cost levels are Zillow’s $963 asking-rent index and HUD’s $960 two-bedroom Fair Market Rent; their $3 difference is a benchmark gap, not a hazard charge. No insurance, repair, tax, maintenance, mitigation, or financing-cost figure is supplied. As a result, FEMA adds a condition for market-wide diligence, but the provided evidence cannot translate its risk values into a household or owner cost.

A practical decision file would keep the source boundaries intact. The unresolved Zillow item is a dated rent history sufficient to calculate the trailing-12-month change, with the asking-rent unit mix identified. The Census Building Permits record needs completion and occupancy evidence before its 114 permits are treated as active stock, while Redfin listing records need price-drop and sale-to-list detail by comparable market segment. The BLS labor change of -0.62% warrants examination of underlying employment detail rather than an inference from the headline alone. IRS migration, HMDA occupancy classifications, and FEMA’s inland-flood evidence also need to be read with relevant timing, coverage, and cost documents. This sequence does not favor renting, owning, or investing. It creates a way to test the central tension: current Zillow value growth and constrained Redfin supply coexist with a missing rent-change measurement, reported job decline, increasing price drops, and incomplete hazard-cost evidence.