Every month a national number comes out, the coverage settles on a single percentage, and somebody in Middletown reads it and concludes their house went nowhere. The home price headlines are not inaccurate. They are just measuring something that has very little to do with any individual house in Monmouth or Ocean County.
The latest release is a clean illustration of why.
What the latest home price headlines actually said
The February existing-home sales report put the national median at $398,000, up 0.3% from a year earlier. Essentially flat. That is the number that ran everywhere.
The same report put the Northeast median at $479,800, up 3.3%.
Eleven times the national growth rate, in the same report, on the same page. One of those numbers describes this market and one does not, and only one of them made the headline.
The gap shows up in the pace too. Nationally, the median home took 47 days to sell, up from 42 a year before, with 3.8 months of supply. Both of those are roughly double what Monmouth County has been running.
Reason one: home price headlines are a national average
A single national median blends markets that stopped behaving alike years ago.
Large stretches of Texas, Florida and the mountain West built aggressively through the last cycle and are now working off genuine surpluses. Prices there have softened, inventory has climbed, and sellers are negotiating.
The Northeast had no construction boom to unwind. Inventory never recovered to anything like balanced. Those two stories average into “roughly flat,” which accurately describes neither of them.
So when a national figure lands near zero, the useful question is not whether prices are rising. It is whose prices.
Reason two: a median is the middle sale, not the middle house
This one is subtler than the regional gap, and it is where even local home price headlines mislead.
A median sale price tells you what the middle transaction was. It does not tell you what happened to the value of any house, including the ones that did not sell.
Change the mix of what sells and the median moves on its own. If townhomes and condos make up a larger share of closings this month, the median falls, even if every single house in the county gained value. If a handful of oceanfront sales close in one month, the median jumps, and nobody’s house changed.
Monmouth County sees this constantly, because the attached market and the single-family market trade at very different price points. A shift of a few dozen sales between them moves the county number without telling you anything about your street. I wrote about a related version of this problem in the piece on what the inventory numbers are actually showing.
Reason three: even a county median is too broad here
County-level home price headlines have the same problem in miniature. Monmouth County contains Deal and it contains Keansburg. Those are not the same market in any sense that matters.
You can see the spread in the 2025 average residential property tax bills, which track assessed value: Deal at $25,585, Rumson at $23,607, Middletown at $11,666, Howell at $9,885, Shrewsbury Township at $5,127. A single county figure is the average of all of that.
Which means a “Monmouth County prices down 2%” headline is compatible with Rumson up 5% and an inland submarket down 6%, or the reverse, or neither. The county number does not constrain what happened on your block. I went through how this town-level spread drives the tax math in the piece on downsizing and property taxes.
The four numbers that beat home price headlines
If you want to know what your house is actually worth, these are the ones worth asking your agent for, in order of usefulness:
- Percent of list price received, in your town. The single best real-time read on negotiating leverage. Above 100% means buyers are competing. Below 97% means they are not.
- Months of supply, in your price band. Under three months is a seller’s market. Over six is a buyer’s. The county number hides big differences between price bands.
- Days on market for comparable homes. Not the average for everything, just for houses like yours.
- Price per square foot on actual closed comps. Closed, not listed. What someone asked for is not data.
Four numbers, all specific to your town and your price point, all available in an afternoon. Any one of them tells you more than a national median does.
What this means if you are selling
Do not price off national home price headlines. A seller who reads “prices are flat” and discounts accordingly is leaving money on the table in a market where the regional number is up 3.3% and houses are moving in half the national time.
The reverse error is just as expensive. A seller who reads a strong regional number and adds 8% to the comps ends up sitting, and the longer a listing sits the worse its eventual outcome.
Price against your own town’s closed comps and percent-of-list figures. Everything else is context, not input.
What this means if you are buying
The national narrative of softening prices and negotiating room is real, and it is mostly happening somewhere else. Arriving here expecting to work off a national script is how buyers lose houses.
That said, the regional strength is not uniform either. There are towns, price bands and property types in Monmouth and Ocean County with genuine room in them right now, and finding those is a local-data exercise rather than a headline-reading one.
The bottom line
National home price headlines are a real measurement of a real thing. That thing is the middle sale in a country of wildly divergent markets, and it is not a valuation of your house.
In February, the national figure said 0.3% and the regional figure said 3.3%, in the same report. The second one is closer to home, and the town-level numbers are closer still.
If you want the four numbers above for your specific town and price point rather than a national average, get in touch and I will pull them. If you are thinking about selling, it is also worth knowing which pre-sale updates actually pay back here before you spend anything.
Thinking about selling? You can get the number that describes your own house, and I am glad to go through it with you and tell you what I think it would actually sell for.
Ready to look? You can search every listing in the area here, straight from the MLS and updated continuously.
National and regional figures reflect the National Association of Realtors existing-home sales report for February 2026. Average residential property tax figures are 2025 municipal averages and are used here only to illustrate the spread between towns; they are not sale prices. Local market statistics vary by town, price band, and property type. For figures specific to your property, ask for a current comparative market analysis.
Shea Merritt is a licensed New Jersey real estate agent with eXp Realty, working with buyers and sellers across Middlesex, Monmouth, and Ocean counties. He grew up in Old Bridge. He writes here about the arithmetic behind a move: what a house would actually bring today, what the tax line does to a monthly payment, and how to compare offers on their terms rather than on the top number. If you are weighing a sale or a purchase, send him the address and he will run the numbers on it.