A Year Ago It Was $1,000,000. Now the Same Sale Is $868,000

If you bought here a few years back and you've been keeping half an eye on what your place might be worth today, you already suspect the number moved. The question is which direction, and by how much.

Here's the answer. In the twelve weeks ending September 13, 2026, the median home across the territory sold for $868,000. A year earlier, over the same twelve-week window, that number was $1,000,000. It also took longer to get there: the median time on market this period was 47 days, up from 35 days a year earlier.

Both of those moves are big enough, and consistent enough across enough sales, that they aren't noise. This wasn't one expensive ZIP dragging the median down or one slow month skewing the days-on-market count. It's a broad, measured shift across the whole territory.

Not every part of the map is telling the same story, though, and the shape of the disagreement is worth sitting with. Take San Jose, where one stretch of the city saw its median sale price fall by about 10% year over year. You'd expect sellers there to be conceding ground to get a deal done. Instead, the average sale-to-list ratio in that same area rose by about 2 percentage points compared with a year earlier. Homes are selling for meaningfully less, and buyers are paying closer to the asking price to get them. That's not a contradiction so much as a market that repriced first and then settled at the new number.

The pace of that settling isn't uniform either. In Tracy, the median time it took a listing to go under contract ran 59 days this period. In one of the San Jose markets, the same measure ran just 10 days. Both of those are inside the same buy box, in the same twelve weeks. A homeowner in one of those places is living in a genuinely different market than a homeowner in the other, even though both would read the same territory-wide headline.

Put together, that means the flat "days on market went up" line hides more than it shows. Some corners of this territory are still moving close to on-schedule. Others have stretched out by weeks. Anyone using a single number to guess at their own timeline is probably wrong in one direction or the other.

For a seller, the practical version of this is straightforward: expect the process to take longer than it did a year ago, and price with today's number in mind rather than the one from last spring's conversation with a neighbor. Fewer buyers are competing for the same house than were a year ago across parts of this territory, and that shows up as more time before an offer lands, not necessarily as a worse offer once one does.

For a buyer, that same stretch is room. Longer time on market generally means more chances to see a place, think it over, and negotiate rather than rush a decision to beat five other offers.

Across the territory, 1,472 homes sold in this twelve-week window, compared with 1,501 in the same window a year earlier. That's a modest pullback in volume, not a collapse, and it fits with a market that's slower but still functioning.

What would tell us whether this holds is simple: watch whether the gap between the fast-moving and slow-moving parts of the territory narrows or widens next period. If the slower markets keep stretching while the faster ones hold steady, that's a market sorting itself by location. If they start moving together, this period's numbers were closer to a blip.

This is MLS sold data across the territory's ZIP codes, not a valuation of any specific home. If you want to know what your own place would likely sell for in today's market, given how differently this is playing out block by block, ask for a current home value estimate and we'll walk through what the numbers say about your specific street.