MARKET · OCTOBER 26, 2026

Monday Market Update: The Right Price Sells in Two Weeks

A breakdown of 46,160 Phoenix area closings this year says the typical home needed 44 days to sell but only 14 of them at the price that sold it, and the discount at the end was the same whether it was cut once or five times. Also this week: three cities are left above 110, supply reached 5.7 months, and the Fed decides Wednesday.

The Signal

A home that sat for seven months was not a seven-month sale. Most of that time went to finding a price that worked; once it got there, the home sold in roughly two weeks. That is what a new breakdown of this year's resale closings across Maricopa and Pinal counties shows, 46,160 of them through October 23: the typical home logged 44 days on the market in total and just 14 of them at the asking price it finally sold for. Just under half of sellers, 44.5%, never touched their price and found a buyer within a median 13 days. The remaining 55.5% adjusted at least once; they needed a median 93 days, but only 16 of those were spent at the number that finally sold, with the other 68 at prices buyers passed on. How many cuts it took barely mattered once the price was right. Homes with a single change sat 16 days at their final price and homes with five or more sat 15, even though their total time on the market ran from 50 days to 210. What the extra cuts cost shows up against the first asking price, not the last one. Homes that changed price closed at roughly 98% of the last asking price no matter how many cuts came first, but against the original list price the median sale slid from 99.2% with no changes to 95.3% after one cut, then 92.9%, 91.1%, 89.5%, and 86.5% as the count rose to two, three, four, and five or more. Five years ago almost nobody needed to do this: in 2021, 79.1% of sellers never changed their price and still went under contract within a median four days. Last year 43.5% sold without a change, so 2026 is the second straight year in which most sellers have had to move their price at least once.

The weekly table says why that lesson matters right now. Fountain Hills fell 32% over the past month to 107.2 on the Cromford Market Index and Cave Creek fell 18% to 103.8, which takes both out of the band above 110 that marks a clear seller's market and leaves three cities there: Scottsdale at 138.8, Paradise Valley at 123.4, and Chandler at 114.3. A month ago five cities read above 110; in mid-September, seven did. Mesa at 90.6 and Glendale at 90.4 now sit within a point of buyer's territory. Every one of the eighteen cities weakened over the past month for the fourth straight week, with the average reading down about 15%: Paradise Valley lost 28%, Peoria 19%, Cave Creek 18%, and Mesa 17%, and Scottsdale's 13% decline was its largest of the season. Measured from early September, Fountain Hills is down 45% from 193.4, and Paradise Valley is down 42% from the 212.1 it read in late August. The valley-wide index, which measures the balance between supply and demand rather than prices, reads 68.2, its seventh straight weekly decline from 80.1, against 77.6 a month ago, 78.5 a year ago, and 91.7 two years ago.

The Numbers

Active listings excluding those under contract stand at 27,918, up 7.9% from a year ago and 8.7% from a month ago, a gain of more than 2,200 homes in a month. Listings under contract fell to 6,171, down 16.0% from a year ago and 9.8% in a month, and pending listings dropped to 3,725, down 12.7%. Sales per month came in at 4,887, down 16.9% from a year ago and 21.0% from a month ago. Days on market for sales stayed at 84 against 86 a month ago and 85 a year ago. Months of supply excluding under contract rose to 5.7 from 4.4 a year ago and 4.2 a month ago, and days of inventory reached 134 from 122.

The average sale price finished at $619,214, up 4.1%, while the median slipped to $444,990, down 1.1% from $450,000 a year ago. The average sale price as a share of list was 97.20%, against 97.25% a year ago. Monthly dollar volume was $3.03B, down 13.5%. Monthly appreciation per square foot ran at 3.8% against 1.5% a year ago, a gain of 2.3 points, and up from 3.3% last month. The listing success rate fell to 64.7% from 68.1% a month ago and 68.7% a year ago. Across the eighteen cities tracked, three are seller's markets, seven are balanced, and eight favor buyers, from five, five, and eight a week ago; five cities read above 100 and thirteen below it.

What This Means for the High End

The price-change data is most useful where pricing is hardest, and that is the top of the market. Across the 129 ZIP codes that have logged at least 100 resale closings this year, the median time on market stretches from 20 days in Chandler's 85226 to roughly 110 in Rio Verde's 85263, while the time spent at the final price spans only 11 to 30 days. The slow ZIPs are slow because more of their sellers started high: roughly a third of homes in the three slowest sold without a price change, against well over half in the three fastest. A custom home in North Scottsdale or Paradise Valley has fewer true comparables than a tract home in Gilbert, so missing on the first number is easier to do and more expensive to fix, and this fall the target is moving. Scottsdale's index fell 13% over the past month and Paradise Valley's 28%, which means a comparable sale that closed in September was negotiated in a market that no longer exists. The contracts written in the last thirty days are the anchor, and the active listings a buyer will tour the same afternoon are the competition.

The 2021 comparison shows what has and has not changed. Five years ago 79.1% of sellers never changed their price and went under contract within a median four days; this year 44.5% do, in 13. Even a correctly priced home now takes about two weeks to find its buyer rather than one. What has not changed is the end of the negotiation: buyers still pay about 98% of the final asking price whether the home was cut once or five times. The market is not punishing the last price. It is punishing the first one. To put numbers on the medians, a home first listed at $2 million that sells after five or more cuts at 86.5% of its original price closes at $1.73 million; a home priced from day one at $1.75 million and sold at 99% of list nets about the same money months sooner, with one set of carrying costs instead of six. For homes over $1 million that is the whole argument for pricing to the current contracts rather than to the summer, and for buyers it is a reminder that a listing with several cuts behind it is priced close to where it will sell.

Part of the right price is the condition the price assumes. A buyer comparing six homes in the same band this fall is pricing in the kitchen, the flooring, and the paint whether the seller does or not, and a home that needs work gets its cut on day one in the form of a lower offer or a longer wait. Every buyer and seller who works with me gets My Exclusive Renovation Offer: I cover the labor for the renovations, and materials are the client's responsibility. For a seller it means the work is finished before the photos, so the first price can be the right price and the home can earn its two weeks instead of its 93 days. For a buyer it means the dated house on the right street in Arcadia or Scottsdale, the one everyone else is discounting for its condition, becomes the one worth owning. Sellers walk out with more money. Buyers walk in with more equity.

What to Watch

Rates gave back a little. Freddie Mac's survey put the 30 year fixed at 7.32% on Thursday, down from 7.40% and the first weekly decline since late August, though still well above the 6.19% of a year ago; the 15 year eased to 6.68%, and daily surveys sat near 7.33% into Monday. The ten year Treasury closed Friday at 4.99%, back under 5% after 5.10% a week earlier and 5.24% in early October, as Thursday's selloff in technology stocks pushed money into bonds even while oil rose for a third straight week to about $103 a barrel on fears of a wider Middle East conflict. The housing data behind the rally was weak. The national index of pending home sales fell 7.3% in September to 66.0, the lowest reading in the history of the index, with the West down 9.2% in the month and 15.0% from a year ago; housing starts fell 5.2%, and mortgage applications dropped for a seventh straight week to their lowest level since January 2025. The Fed decides Wednesday at 11 a.m. Arizona time. Futures put the odds of a hold at 3.75% to 4.00% near 90%, with a December increase priced around 75%. Third quarter GDP and the September PCE inflation report follow Thursday, and the midterm elections are Tuesday, November 3.

For Phoenix, the two halves of this update fit together. Supply is at 5.7 months and has risen about three tenths of a month each week since late September, closed sales are running 16.9% below last year, and the index has fallen for seven straight weeks, so the buyer who walks through a home this week has more to compare it with than the buyer who walked through it last week. The price-change data says what that does to a seller who starts high. The home does not sell for less than its final asking price in the end, about 98% of it either way, but it reaches that price months later and several cuts lower than where it started, and in a market adding roughly 2,200 listings a month the comps move while it waits. The practical version: set the price the last thirty days of contracts support, not August's, and expect about two weeks of real interest once it is right. For buyers, the same table says a home that has been listed 90 days with three cuts is not a seller waiting to be lowballed; the median sale after several cuts still lands at about 98% of the final asking price, the same as after one cut. The leverage is in being the buyer in front of a seller who has not yet made the next cut. At 7.32%, the payment on an 80% loan against the $444,990 median is about $2,445 a month, roughly $270 more than at last year's 6.19%.

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Source: Cromford Associates LLC