Let me show you something that trips up a lot of homeowners.
Earlier this year, one of the neighborhoods I watch closely, Broadlands South, posted a median sale price that was down more than 19 percent from the year before. If you saw that number on a news site or a home-value app, you would probably assume the neighborhood took a beating. Owners lost a fifth of their equity. Time to worry.
Except that is not what happened. Not even close.
In that same neighborhood, over that same stretch, homes were still selling for around 102 percent of their asking price. Several single-family homes sold well over list, including one that closed at 1.66 million dollars. The sellers did fine. So how does a neighborhood post a 19 percent drop in median price while individual homes are selling over asking?
The answer is in what the word median actually measures. The median is just the middle number. Line up every sale from lowest to highest, and the median is the one in the middle of the list. It tells you nothing about whether any single home went up or down in value. It only tells you what kind of homes happened to sell that season.
Here is what changed in Broadlands South. Fewer large estate homes came up for sale. A lot of those bigger-home owners are sitting on mortgages they locked in at three percent, and they are in no rush to trade that for a six-and-a-half percent loan, so they stayed put. With fewer large homes in the sold column, the mix tilted toward townhomes and smaller properties. More modest homes selling pulls the middle number down, even when every individual category of home held its value or gained.
The median dropped. The values did not. Those are two completely different things, and confusing them costs people real money and real sleep.
This is exactly why I will not let a homeowner set their expectations off a Zestimate or a headline county number. Those tools look at broad medians and averages. They cannot see that the three homes most like yours, on your street, with your finishes, sold last month for more than the median suggests. That is what an actual comparative market analysis does. It looks at what homes genuinely comparable to yours have sold for, recently and nearby, and adjusts for the real differences. It answers the only question that matters to you: what will my home, specifically, sell for.
So if you have been watching your neighborhood's median bounce around and wondering what it means for you, the honest answer is: probably not what you think, and possibly nothing at all. The only way to know what your home is worth is to look at your home, not the average of every home that happened to close nearby.
If you want that answer for your place, that is a conversation I am always glad to have. No pressure, no pitch. Just real numbers on your actual house.
Market figures: Source: Bright MLS, mid-2026.