Looking to buy a home for the first time? The Hartford market is a great place to start.

The Greater Hartford area was named the fourth-best market for first-time buyers according to an annual Bankrate study. Bankrate looked at 13 measures related to affordability, culture, job market, market tightness and safety for the nation’s 50 largest metros. The study includes data from Attom Data Solutions, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program, the Gallup-Sharecare Well-Being Index, North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation, Realtor.com and U.S. Census Bureau.

The ranking put Pittsburgh first, Raleigh, North Carolina second, and Oklahoma City third.

The metro regions all have unemployment rates near or below the national average of 3.7 percent and 25- to 44-year-olds in these areas typically earn more than their peers nationwide, according to U.S Census data. Four of the top five best metros had median listing prices below the national median price of $294,800, according to February 2019 data from Realtor.com.

The 2018 median home sale price in Hartford County was $227,000 for a single-family home and $150,000 for a condominium, according to data from The Warren Group, publisher of The Commercial Record.

Many metros near the bottom of the list have plenty of restaurants, bars, recreation options and strong job markets. But their high home prices and tight inventories make these markets challenging for typical first-time buyers.

For-sale homes in the five worst metros only saw 27 to 41 median days on the market in 2018. That’s not a lot of time for buyers, considering the national median was 67 days, according to Realtor.com data. The median listing prices for the bottom five metros ranged from about one and half times to three and a half times that of the national median price of $294,800, the data show.