Half Your Neighbors' Homes Sold Above Asking. Yes, This Summer.

If you own a home in Manchester, Hooksett, or Bedford, you probably assumed this summer was quiet. Fewer people out looking, sellers waiting for a better moment, deals taking longer to close. That's the story everyone tells themselves in late summer.

Here's what the data actually says. Across the territory, the median sale-to-list ratio held at 100 percent, and 52 percent of homes sold for more than the asking price. More than half. That's not a market that's cooling off. That's a market where sellers are still holding the leverage.

The median days on market across the territory was 48 days. That number sounds slow next to "sold over asking," and it's tempting to read it as sellers losing ground. It isn't. A home can sit for seven weeks and still draw a bidding war the day it gets an offer. Speed and leverage are two different questions, and this period answered them differently.

Look closer and the territory isn't one market, it's several stacked on top of each other. In Manchester, homes went to pending in about 7 days. That's one of the two Manchester ZIPs, and it's fast.

A few miles away in Bedford, the median days to pending ran about 60 days, roughly two months. Same twelve weeks, same buy box, a completely different pace.

Price told its own uneven story too. In Hooksett, the median sale price rose about 4 percent year over year. In Bedford, the median sale price rose about 13 percent year over year.

But in Manchester, the median sale price actually fell about 5 percent year over year in that same fast-moving ZIP. And yet the average sale-to-list ratio there rose about 1 percentage point over the same comparison. That's the complication worth sitting with: prices came down in that pocket of Manchester, but sellers there gave up even less ground on asking price than they did a year earlier. Fewer homes changed hands there, and the ones that did still sold close to full price. That's not a market caving to buyers. It's a smaller, pickier one.

What does this look like on a Saturday? In that fast pocket of Manchester, an offer can land within about a week, and this period it landed close to the list price, sometimes over it. In Bedford, sellers should expect a longer runway, two months is a realistic wait before an offer even shows up, but once it does, this period's numbers say they aren't leaving much on the table either.

For sellers, the takeaway is that "slow" and "weak" aren't the same thing. A longer runway doesn't mean a lower number at the end of it. For buyers, especially in the faster Manchester ZIP, the territory's over-asking share says you should walk in expecting competition, not treating list price as a ceiling.

What would change this read is next period's over-asking share. If that 52 percent figure drops toward a third or lower, that's the first real sign sellers are losing the leverage they held this summer. Until then, the numbers say otherwise.

This data comes from MLS sold records across the territory.

Curious what these numbers mean for your own home? I'll put together a straightforward read on what it would list for now, no obligation.