The Numbers Behind the Belmar Real Estate Market: A 2023–2026 Trend Review

The Numbers Behind the Belmar Market: A 2023–2026 Trend Review

Five posts into the Belmar Field Guide, the geography is settled. We’ve walked the three Belmars, the boardwalk, the lakefront corridor, the rental investor math, and the cross-shore comparison. What we haven’t done is sit with the numbers themselves — four years of closed transactions, days on market, and list-to-sale ratios — and ask what they actually say. That’s Part Six. No narrative gymnastics. Just the data, and what a broker reads in it.

An in-depth aerial and street-level tour of Belmar — from its Lenni Lenape origins through Victorian-era beach colony to the present-day tear-down and new construction wave. Context for the numbers below.

Belmar’s single-family market produced four distinct chapters between 2023 and the first quarter of 2026. Volume swung. Average price held a band. Days on market drifted. And the percentage of list price that sellers actually collected told the most honest story of the cycle.

Three patterns jump off that table. First, the average sale price held a remarkably tight band — $1.53M to $1.56M — across 2024 and 2025 even as transaction counts dropped 20%. Second, days on market nearly doubled from 2024’s 40-day peak velocity to Q1 2026’s 74. Third, the percentage of list price that sellers collected fell every period from the 2024 peak. Those three movements, read together, tell you exactly where Belmar sits in the cycle.

Twelve closings at an average of $1.13M. On paper, that’s a $400,000 average price drop versus full-year 2025. In practice, it’s a mix-shift story, not a market collapse.

Belmar’s winter quarter typically transacts the lower end of the inventory pool. The beach-block and oceanfront trades cluster heavily into late spring and early summer, when second-home buyers can walk the property and visualize a season. Twelve homes is not a sample large enough to draw a trend line from — it’s a sample large enough to reflect which twelve homes happened to come to contract during a quarter where mortgage rates remained above 6% and inventory in the higher-priced tiers was thin. The 95% list-to-sale ratio matters more than the $1.13M average. That’s a real number. Buyers are negotiating.

Statewide context lines up. New Jersey Realtors reported Q1 2026 closed sales down 6.1% year over year, with median price up 2.2%. Monmouth County’s January 2026 closings fell roughly 19% against the prior January. Fewer transactions at firmer prices is a national pattern, and Belmar is tracking it — not breaking from it.

If you want one number that captures what changed between 2024 and 2026, it’s days on market.

Forty to seventy-four in two years isn’t noise. It’s a structural shift. For context, Monmouth County overall ran roughly 30 days on market in January 2026, and the broader 07719 ZIP — which captures Lake Como, West Belmar, and adjacent Wall pockets — sat around 46 days in March 2026. Belmar single-family is running materially slower than both.

There’s a reason. The Belmar single-family pool skews high-price-point relative to the surrounding ZIP, and high-price-point properties carry longer decision windows in any rate environment. When buyers can’t refinance their way into the deal — and at low-6% rates, very few can — carrying costs at the $1.5M+ level demand more deliberation. The market isn’t broken. It’s thinking.

▸ Broker’s Note

“Days on market doubling from 40 to 74 in two years isn’t noise — it’s the market returning to a more rational pricing dynamic after three years of compression.”

— Anthony Licciardello, Broker, The Prodigy Team

In 2024, the average Belmar single-family seller collected 100% of asking. In the first half of 2025, that briefly ran to 101%. By year-end 2025, it had settled at 99%. In Q1 2026, it was 95%.

A five-point swing from peak to current is meaningful. On a $1.5M listing, the difference between 100% and 95% is $75,000. That’s the entire negotiation window most sellers planned for — and then some. Pricing strategy in 2024 was “list at the comp and let the market push it up.” Pricing strategy in 2026 has to assume the comp is the ceiling, not the floor.

For comparison, statewide New Jersey ran 100.3% list-to-sale in Q1 2026 and roughly 43% of closed homes sold above ask in March. Belmar is trailing the state. That’s not weakness in the absolute — it’s the price-point effect again. Higher-priced markets give back the over-ask premium first.

Belmar Borough doesn’t publish months-of-supply at the municipal level, but Monmouth County does — and the proxy is informative. The county ran 2.1 months of supply in November 2025 and 2.8 months in August. Anything below six is a sellers’ market, by convention. The county is comfortably below half that.

That’s the tension that runs through every other number in this post. Days on market is lengthening and list-to-sale is softening, but inventory is not building. The lock-in effect — homeowners holding sub-4% mortgages who won’t list because the replacement cost-of-capital is prohibitive — is still the single most important structural factor in Belmar’s supply picture. Listings come on slowly. They sit longer than they did. But there aren’t enough of them to flip the negotiating posture wholesale.

Three macro factors explain most of what the table shows.

Mortgage rates. The 30-year fixed averaged 6.19% in early 2026, down from 6.54% a year earlier. Fannie Mae’s April 2026 Housing Forecast revised its rate path upward following geopolitical rate spikes, projecting 6.3% in Q2 2026 and 6.1% through the back half of 2026 and into 2027. The Mortgage Bankers Association sits in the same 6.1%–6.3% band. The National Association of Realtors lands at roughly 6.0% by year-end. The takeaway: the consensus has shifted decisively away from a near-term return to the 5s. Low-6s is the operating environment.

Flood insurance. FEMA’s Risk Rating 2.0, fully rolled out in 2023, replaced zone-based pricing with property-specific pricing. Roughly 77% of NFIP policyholders nationally see some increase under the new system, capped at 18% per year until the property reaches its full-risk rate. New Jersey is among the most affected states — FEMA data showed more than 137,000 NJ policyholders facing increases of up to $120 per year, and another 22,400+ facing increases of up to $240 per year. For Belmar specifically, where Redfin/First Street data shows roughly 49% of properties at risk of severe flooding over the next 30 years, that’s not background noise. It’s a line item in every buyer’s pro forma.

Property taxes. The New Jersey Department of Community Affairs reported that statewide average property taxes rose roughly 5% in 2025, to $10,570 — the second consecutive year the state average has topped $10,000, and the highest in the nation. Belmar’s specific bill varies by lot size and assessment, but the trajectory is the same. For buyers underwriting carrying costs, a thousand-dollar annual increase in the property tax line over a holding period is real money. Combined with insurance and higher financing costs, it’s the third leg of the affordability tripod that’s lengthening decision timelines.

The institutional forecasters — Fannie Mae, MBA, NAR, Realtor.com, Zillow, Cotality — cluster around modest national appreciation in 2026, in the 2% to 4% range. Fannie Mae’s April 2026 release moved its national price expectation up to roughly +3.4% in Q2 and +3.2% by Q4. NAR is at +4%. MBA is closer to flat. The mean is appreciation, not depreciation, but appreciation slower than the post-2020 trajectory.

For Belmar specifically, two local factors will matter more than the national average. The first is the Mara by Vermella project at 800 River Road — 198 units, 178 market-rate and 20 affordable, on a 3.23-acre parcel adjacent to the NJ Transit station. The Planning Board approved it in August 2025, Russo Development secured construction financing through PNC Bank in March 2026, and construction is targeted to begin this spring with completion before fall 2027. That’s rental supply, not for-sale supply. It won’t directly pressure single-family pricing. But it will affect rental comps and yield assumptions for investor buyers underwriting Belmar against Spring Lake or Asbury Park.

The second is the spring-summer transaction window. If Q2 and Q3 2026 closings come in at higher average prices than the Q1 $1.13M figure — and they almost certainly will, given Belmar’s seasonal pattern — the full-year 2026 average will likely land within a reasonable distance of the 2024–2025 band. The question isn’t whether average prices will recover. They will, on mix alone. The question is whether the list-to-sale ratio recovers, or whether 95% is the new operating environment.

▸ The Working Assumption

“The 2024 strategy of pricing aggressively and letting bidders sort it out is gone. Pricing to the comp — and being willing to negotiate three to five percent off — is the working assumption for the rest of 2026.”

— Anthony Licciardello, Broker, The Prodigy Team

Four years of MOMLS data say Belmar is in a normal post-peak cooling, not a downturn. Volume is constrained by lock-in. DOM is lengthening because price points are high and capital is expensive. List-to-sale is softening because buyers finally have time and air to negotiate. None of those are crisis signals. They are the signals of a market returning to a more rational pricing dynamic after three years of compression.

For sellers, the implication is concrete: list price now does most of the work. The 2024 strategy of pricing aggressively and letting bidders sort it out is gone. Pricing to the comp — and being willing to negotiate three to five percent off — is the working assumption. Days on market over 60 means the listing is overpriced, not the market is broken.

For buyers, the opposite is true. There is room to negotiate that simply did not exist in 2024. Inspection contingencies are getting respected again. Appraisal gaps are smaller. Sellers who price above the comp on the assumption that the market will catch up are sitting. Sellers who price to the comp are still moving. That’s the dividing line.

Written by

Anthony Licciardello

Broker, The Prodigy Team · (718) 873-7345