If family plans are in the future, Cranston isn’t a bad place to start.

The city saw one of the most significant jumps in the Metro & East Bay areas in terms of single-family home sales, increasing from 825 to 884 by the end of 2016, according to a from State-Wide Multiple Listing Service, Inc. That total is more than 200 more homes than the next closest city, Providence, at 576. Despite the increase, Cranston still sits in second behind Warwick, which holds the state lead at 1,303 sales.

While the median price for a home in Cranston has increased 5.13 percent from $195,000 to $205,000, that figure still falls $24,900 below the median price tag on a single-family home in Rhode Island.

This affordability has helped Cranston on the national scale, too. Apartmentlife.com has also named Cranston one of the top 100 cities in the country in which to raise a family. Cranston registers at No. 99 on the website rankings, slotting just ahead of its neighbor to the south, Warwick. Four categories factored into the assessment: Safety (35 percent), Housing Affordability (30 percent), Education Quality (25 percent) and Child Friendliness (10 percent).

While at a severe disadvantage to Warwick in terms of Apartment Life’s affordability score, 92.2 to 70.7, Cranston beats it out in education and child friendliness by notable margins. Cranston also held the edge in safety. Overall, Cranston edged Warwick out, 68.5 to 68.34, to earn the mantle of the state’s best family city. Both cities earned a B grade.

“Third [time] in a row and fourth in five years, one of the best places to live in America,” Cranston Mayor Allan Fung said, referring to a list released by 24/7 Wall Street that has called Cranston a top-50 city in the nation. “That’s something that we’re very proud of because to take it from where it was when I came in, the financial mess that we inherited, the problems within the city itself, to take it from there to having one of the best places to live is big.”

Cranston ReMax associate Judith Albanese provided insight on why the market experienced a boom this year. Rhode Island Housing instituted a $20,000 grant over the summer for any first-time homebuyer who purchased a distressed or bank-owned property or short sale houses.

“I sold houses to 18-, 20-, 22-year-olds because they were getting $20,000 free if they lived in the house,” Albanese said. “It needed some work, but they didn’t care. This summer it’s all we dealt with.”

The grant’s incentives could help to explain the 36.05 percent increase in distressed properties, from 86 to 117. Albanese said that the impetus to buy in 2016 was driven by an interest in locking in lower mortgage rates while they lasted.

“With the mortgage rates, people think the mortgage rates are going to be increasing so they’re purchasing now because they want to get the lower rates,” Albanese said. “That’s why there’s been a jump in homeownership throughout the state, not just Cranston.”

The grant program was so wildly successful that it ran out by early December, according to Albanese. She said that an examination of home purchases since Dec. 1 shows the numbers already starting to decline.

“They were going to buy properties because they wanted to get that $20,000,” Albanese said. “It made them be able to buy more property. It was the cause for a lot of purchasing this year. What they were trying to do was a get a lot of these distressed properties off the market.”

The expiration of the grant is one reason, Albanese said, the market could once again take a downturn in 2017.

“That, and also there’s not many houses on the market right now,” she said. “The lack of inventory, and the rates are starting to creep up.”

For now, though, Cranston has joined myriad cities across the state in experiencing a hike in single-family home sales. Fung said that the city’s commitment to improvements all over, from retail to parks and recreation, has helped boost the market as well.

“There’s actually more to come that I can’t announce yet, but it’s those little types of projects we’re working on that make the quality of life fantastic, especially for young families,” Fung said. “We’ve got good schools, you’ve got a great superintendent now who’s innovative, doing a lot of great things in the school system. We’ve got businesses that are thriving.”