For a second straight year, Tempe was ranked as the most popular college town in America by residential real estate company Zillow.

The ranking is part of Zillow’s (Nasdaq: Z) annual most popular city indexes, which considered weighted housing indicators and variables in several different "most popular" categories: overall, large cities, seaside towns, retirement towns, small towns, vacation towns and college towns.

Tempe is home to Arizona State University’s main campus, and it came out ahead after Zillow created an index based on the number of rental listings, median list rent, rent growth and rental page views — the last of which had the most weight.

The Valley city had the second-highest total number of rental listings among all the college towns considered. Only Cambridge, Massachusetts had more.

In addition, Tempe had one of the largest populations of undergraduate and graduate college students, Zillow said. That’s a fact also highlighted in last year’s report.

Coming in after Tempe were Smithfield, Rhode Island, home of Bryant University, and Bowling Green, Ohio, home of Bowling Green State University. Neither of those towns were in the top three last year.

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By Jeff Gifford - Digital Editor, Phoenix Business Journal