Warren closed 39 homes in the first quarter, and March took 65 days to sell at 101.3 percent of ask

The quarter, month by month

Same quarter, prior year, for comparison.

Thirty nine closings against 26 is an increase of 50 percent. That is the headline, and it is also the number most likely to be misread. Warren is a small market. A quarter that moves from 26 to 39 has moved by 13 houses. Thirteen houses is a rounding error in a county wide statistic and a real shift in a township this size, and both of those things are true at once.

February is four sales

February 2026 produced 4 closings. Every February figure in the table above rests on those four transactions. The $775,000 median is the middle of four numbers. The 99.2 percent of ask is the average of four. The 33 day median days on market is the middle of four.

I am publishing them because leaving a month out of a quarterly table is worse than publishing it with a warning. But do not build anything on February. A single sale in either direction moves that median by six figures.

For scale, February 2025 had 10 closings and February 2026 had 4. The prior year comparison for that month is 10 observations against 4, which is not a comparison worth leaning on either.

March is the interesting month

March 2026 closed 13 homes. Median days on market was 65, the slowest of the quarter and slower than January by 45 days. Average percent of ask was 101.3, the strongest of the quarter. Six of the 13 closed at or over ask.

Those two readings look contradictory and are not. They measure different stages of the same transaction.

Days on market measures how long a listing sat before it went under contract. A 65 day median says the typical March closing had been on the market for a while. Percent of ask measures what happened once a buyer actually engaged. A 101.3 average says that when buyers came to the table, they came at or above the asking price often enough to pull the average above 100.

The combination describes a market with slow discovery and firm resolution. Buyers were not sweeping listings off the board in the first week. When one did commit, the negotiation did not go the seller's way slowly, it went the seller's way. Six of 13 above ask on a 65 day median is that pattern.

The alternative reading is that a handful of quickly bid properties pulled the average up while the rest of the month sat, and the record I have does not distinguish between the two. Average percent of ask does not tell you the shape of the distribution.

About that $1,250,000

Median original ask in March 2026 was $1,250,000, and median closed price was $880,000. Those two numbers do not belong in the same sentence without an explanation, so here it is.

The $1,250,000 is the median original ask across the 19 new listings taken in March. The $880,000 is the median closed price across the 13 homes that closed in March. Those are two different sets of houses. The homes that closed in March were listed weeks or months earlier, at a different mix of price points.

The number that actually connects list price to sale price is percent of ask, and that ran 101.3 for the month. The gap between the two medians is a mix effect, not a discount.

Supply

New listings taken in Q1 2026 were 8, 17 and 19, totaling 44. The same three months of 2025 produced 8, 11 and 19, totaling 38.

January was identical at 8 both years. March was identical at 19 both years. The entire quarterly difference sits in February, 17 against 11. Sellers came to market at close to last year's pace, with a February that ran ahead.

My read

Labeled as opinion and separated from the numbers above. The volume recovery from 26 to 39 is real and the March percent of ask is the more durable signal in the quarter, because it rests on 13 transactions rather than 4. The February medians are noise. I would not draw a trend line through this quarter in either direction, and I would want to see the second quarter before saying anything about where the year is going.