Week 3 — What the Board Is Telling Us

The board is largely steady this week at the top. Sherman and Indianapolis hold their NOW positions. The NEXT tier remains intact. What's worth talking about is what's happening just below the surface — and one market in particular that's moving faster than most readers would expect.

San Antonio enters the top of the LATER tier this week at 5.04 — the highest LATER score on the board, and within range of NEXT territory. The catalyst is Toyota's $531M EV battery expansion, which is now operational.

That last word matters. Operational means workers are there. It means the income band exists in the market today, not in 2028. The question the framework is now asking is whether the housing market has fully absorbed that workforce or whether there's still a pricing delta to capture. At 5.04, the answer is: not yet fully absorbed, but watch closely. If Progress continues to advance, San Antonio could cross into NEXT within a cycle or two.

This is exactly the kind of move the board is designed to surface — a market that doesn't have a $30B headline number but has something arguably more useful right now: real workers, real wages, and a market that hasn't fully repriced.

Last week St. Louis entered NEXT on the strength of the Boeing F-47 fighter contract and campus expansion. This week the primary catalyst is clarified as the NGA Next $1.7B government campus, now operational for less than 18 months. The Boeing story remains relevant context, but the NGA campus is the more precise anchor — a permanent, high-clearance federal workforce in a market that has meaningful housing capacity to absorb it.

The score holds at 5.5. The story gets more specific, which is a good thing.

Huntsville pulled back from 4.6 to 3.9 this week. The Redstone Arsenal and Mazda Toyota stack remain real, but a closer look at the Progress scoring revealed the catalyst stack is more mature than the initial read suggested. The repricing thesis is still valid — it's a question of how much delta remains. We'd rather be conservative here and revise upward on evidence than carry an inflated score into a thesis we can't defend.

This is the framework working as intended.

Sherman and Indianapolis haven't moved, and that's the right read. Sherman's thesis is intact — workers arriving now, zero existing supply for that income band, active repricing underway. Indianapolis continues to compound: Eli Lilly construction progressing, IU Health opening in 2026, a multi-catalyst stack that deepens rather than dilutes.

The bar for NOW is high by design. Two metros is the right number right now.

Three things worth tracking heading into Week 4:

San Antonio's absorption data. If cap rate compression is already visible in the Toyota workforce corridors, the score moves up. If the market has already repriced, it moves to LATER mid-tier and stays there.

West Lafayette's hiring timeline. SK hynix is under construction. The moment hiring announcements begin in earnest, the Progress score accelerates and the deployment window tightens.

The NEXT tier depth. Five metros at NEXT is the widest that tier has been. Tulsa, St. Louis, and Knoxville are all early in their tenure on the board. At least one of them will either confirm or disappoint over the next 60 days.

Scoring universe: 52 U.S. metros with qualifying catalyst activity as of Mar 11, 2026 Hero × Progress framework. Tier boundaries: NOW 7.5–10.0 / NEXT 5.5–7.4 / LATER 3.5–5.4 / FUNNEL <3.5 All predictions tracked and published. Not investment advice.