Pip: Lindsay Hart pulled six years of her own MLS data, ran the numbers county by county, and then wrote it all up so the rest of us wouldn’t have to pretend we understood the headlines.
Mara: That’s the thread running through this episode — what the local data actually shows about inventory, price signals, and how different counties in the Finger Lakes and Southern Tier are moving right now.
Pip: Let’s start with what’s happening to supply, demand, and the gap opening up between them.
Crowded Markets and Price Signals
Mara: The core question here is whether rising inventory means the market is breaking down — or just normalizing after years of extreme scarcity.
Pip: The June 2026 data sets the frame clearly: “Homes for sale in the Ithaca MLS reached 355 in June 2026, up 43.7% from a year ago. That’s not a one-month spike — it’s the fourth straight year of steady climbs.”
Mara: So the upshot is that inventory has been building systematically, not spiking. Months of supply nearly doubled year-over-year, from 3.8 to 5.8 — which puts Tompkins County at the edge of what’s conventionally called a balanced market.
Pip: And prices reflect it. Median sales price slipped from $369,900 to $360,500. Days on market are up. The percent of list price received dropped from 101.6% to 98.8% — sellers are no longer routinely fielding over-ask offers.
Mara: The number that stands out most is pending sales, down 55% in June alone, from 80 to 36. Because pendings typically convert to closings within 30 to 60 days, that signals further softening ahead.
Pip: Which is where the second piece becomes essential. Six years of MLS data — 9,820 closed sales, 68 months — and the finding that surprised even the analyst running the numbers.
Mara: Closed sales for January through August came in at 970 in 2024, 988 in 2025, and 989 in 2026. As that post puts it:
“Whatever is changing in this market, it is not buyer demand. Buyer demand has been the single most boring number on my spreadsheet for three years running.”
Pip: So the escalator didn’t break — it just stopped going up. More sellers arrived, same number of buyers showed up, and the gap between them is doing all the work.
Mara: New listings are up 16.6% over two years. Sell-through — the share of listings that actually find a buyer — dropped from about 75% in 2021 to 61.5% in 2026. That’s 200 more sellers competing for the same pool.
Pip: Not a crash. Just crowded. Which is a genuinely different problem to solve.
Mara: And the crowding looks different depending on which county you’re in — that’s exactly what the regional data breaks down.
Regional Housing Pulse
Mara: Zooming out to the seven-county Finger Lakes and Southern Tier region, the weekly snapshot shows that “balanced” isn’t uniform — some markets are moving fast, others are stalling.
Pip: Seneca County is the quiet outlier: “Pending homes there spent a median of just 10 days on market and required an average price trim of only 5.7% — the best combination of speed and pricing discipline across all seven counties.”
Mara: What that means in practice is that correctly priced listings in Seneca are clearing in under two weeks. Chemung runs 30 days to pending. Cortland runs 57. The gap between pricing right and testing the ceiling is measured in months of carrying costs.
Pip: Tompkins’ 37 expired and withdrawn listings looked alarming until you strip out a 28-lot builder batch in Lansing that expired simultaneously — a single developer’s inventory, not independent sellers walking away.
Mara: Once you remove that cluster, Tompkins’ pending activity tracks right alongside Cayuga and Seneca. The regional picture is a market sorting itself by pricing discipline, county by county.
Pip: Same buyers, more houses, and the counties that figured out pricing first are the ones clearing inventory.
Mara: Next time, we’ll see whether those signals hold or shift as the fall season comes into view.
