Market Trends colours every US state, county and ZIP by gross rental yield, median rent times twelve divided by median home value. The first version painted all of it in one green ramp, pale to deep. That looked like REIzer, and it hid what the map was for. Every region was some shade of green, so the eye had nowhere to go, and at ZIP level the fills buried the streets, water and neighbourhood names that make a ZIP a place.
Green means above the US median
The map now divides at one line: the US median gross yield. Areas below it sit in three quiet shades of grey, never heavier than a light slate. Areas above it take four greens, from a pale wash just over the median up to a deep green for the top of the country. One colour system runs through every tier, the legend, the leaderboard and the panel, so a green county and a green state mean the same thing. The legend marks the median so you can see which side of it a shade belongs to.
Price and rent were also green, which made cheap markets and expensive ones look like good and bad ones. Both now use a neutral light-to-charcoal ramp. Green is reserved for the one thing it should mean on this page.
ZIP level: the number, not the paint
Zoomed in, ZIP areas no longer have a fill at all. Each one is outlined in its class colour, heavier where it sits above the median, and the yield is printed on a small chip at its centre. Green chips are above the median, white chips below. Where chips would collide, the higher yield keeps its place. The basemap stays fully readable underneath, so you can see that a nine percent ZIP is the one along the river and not the one by the airport. Hover lights the area, a click pins it.
The panel says where a market stands
Pin any state, county or ZIP and the panel leads with the yield in plain ink, then a chip that says the class in words and the distance from the median in points. Under it a strip shows where the market falls across the national spread, from the tenth percentile to the ninetieth, with the median marked. The scatter and leaderboard use the same classes and no longer tint their own chrome green.
The controls across the page moved onto the same charcoal used everywhere else in REIzer, so the only green left on the page is data.