Anthony Licciardello | October 21, 2026
Union County
Eleven of the fourteen Union County markets that publish a price-cut share saw that share rise in September. In the same month, most homes in most of those same markets still sold above the asking price — and in Summit, both numbers climbed more than thirteen points at once. A market doing two opposite things is not a contradiction. It is a market that has stopped behaving as one market.
Read Union County at the county line and September looks like a market easing: the price-cut share up to 11.6%, the sale-to-list ratio down a point and a half to 102.6%, the share of homes selling above asking down four and a half points to 61%. Read the same month town by town and that story comes apart. In Summit the price-cut share rose 13.3 points and the share of homes selling above asking rose 12.6 points. Westfield ran a smaller version of the same split. What is separating is not one town from another. It is accurately priced listings from everything else — and the distance between the two is now wide enough to read directly off the data.
By Anthony Licciardello, Broker · The Prodigy Team · Published October 20, 2026 · Data through September 2026
The county average Where both rose Where sellers gave ground The one outlier What it asks of a seller FAQ
There is a number most sellers in Union County heard some version of this month, and it is true: more listings are cutting their price than were cutting a year ago. Countywide the share went from 10.3% to 11.6%. There is a second number almost nobody heard, and it is also true: in September, 61% of Union County homes that sold, sold for more than the seller was asking.
Those two facts are usually treated as a debate — one side arguing the market has turned, the other arguing it has not. They are not a debate. They are a description. Both are measured from the same transactions, and the only way both hold at once is if the listings doing the cutting and the listings clearing over asking are mostly not the same listings.
That is what the September data shows at the town level, and it shows it most clearly in the towns where you would least expect to find a price cut.
The county-level September figures, taken alone, sketch a market cooling at the edges. Median days on market at 27, three days faster than a year ago. Median sale price $658,526, up 3.2%. Price cuts up 1.3 points. Sale-to-list down 1.5 points. Share above list down 4.5 points. Mixed, slightly softer, nothing dramatic.
An average does what averages do. Union County contains Elizabeth at a $648,691 median with homes sitting 43 days, and it contains Summit, where the typical sale closed at 111.2% of its asking price. Rolling those into one line produces a number that describes neither of them and no actual seller's situation.
Across the nineteen Union County markets with a comparable September row, the share of homes selling above the asking price ranges from 38.5% to 86.8% — a spread of 48.3 percentage points. Two markets fourteen miles apart are not running the same experiment. Hillside and Winfield are excluded throughout: neither publishes a comparable September row.
The useful question is not whether the county softened. It is which of the two things happening inside it is happening on your street — and, more to the point, to a house listed the way yours is about to be.
Five Union County markets posted a rise in the price-cut share and a rise in the share of homes selling above asking, in the same month: Summit, Westfield, Roselle, Elizabeth and Kenilworth. On a single-story reading of the market, that combination should not occur. More sellers conceding and more buyers paying over ask are supposed to be opposite signals.
Summit is the clearest case. Its price-cut share rose 13.3 points, to 16.5%. Its share of homes selling above list rose 12.6 points, to 76.4%. Median days on market fell to 14, two days faster than a year ago, and the typical sale closed at 111.2% of asking — the highest sale-to-list ratio of any market in the county.
Price cuts 16.5% (+13.3 pts) · sold above list 76.4% (+12.6 pts) · sale-to-list 111.2% (+2.5 pts) · median 14 days (−2). Three quarters of Summit sellers got more than they asked. A meaningful minority cut first. The difference between those two groups is not the neighborhood.
Westfield ran the same pattern at a lower amplitude: cuts up 13.2 points to 14.2%, above-list up 3.6 points to 73.1%, sale-to-list 106.0%. Days on market lengthened by three, to 17 — still inside three weeks. Nothing in those figures describes a town in difficulty; the Q3 closing data for Westfield shows 81 recorded sales at a $1,500,000 median. What they describe is a town where the penalty for asking too much got heavier while the reward for asking correctly got larger.
Kenilworth is the one that should end the argument. It carries the highest price-cut share in the county at 28.0%, up 3 points. Its median days on market fell by thirty-three, from fifty-two to nineteen. The town with the most sellers cutting is also the town where homes started selling a month faster. Those are not competing readings of Kenilworth. They are the same sentence: a large group of listings that had been priced for a different market repriced, and once repriced, moved.
A rising price-cut share is not evidence that values fell. It counts the listings that changed their asking price, not the prices buyers paid. In all three of these five markets that publish a year-over-year median change — Elizabeth, Roselle and Kenilworth — the median sale price rose at the same time.
The other half of the split is six markets where the two numbers moved the way the conventional story says they should: more listings cutting, fewer homes clearing over asking. Plainfield, Rahway, Springfield, and the ZIP-code areas covering Scotch Plains, Clark and Union.
The largest give was in the Scotch Plains area, where the share selling above list fell 14.0 points to 67.6% while cuts rose 2.3 points, and days on market lengthened by three. The Clark area is close behind: above-list down 11.1 points to 58.3%, cuts up 4.5 points, six days slower. Rahway gave up 9.9 points of above-list share and now sits at 37 days, the second-longest market in the county.
Scotch Plains, Clark, Union, Cranford and Berkeley Heights are reported here by ZIP code — 07076, 07066, 07083, 07016 and 07922 — because no comparable municipal row is published for them. ZIP boundaries are postal, not municipal, and can take in homes outside the town line. Treat them as proxies for the area, not as the town's own number.
Even inside this group the signal is not uniform. Plainfield posted the third-largest rise in price cuts anywhere in the county, up 10.4 points to 24.2% — and its median days on market fell eleven days, to 30, while its sale-to-list ratio rose 2.2 points. More sellers repriced, and the market absorbed the repriced inventory faster than it had the year before. Springfield held flat at 21 days with a 12.2% rise in median sale price.
What distinguishes this group from the first is not weakness. It is that the correction ran through the sale price as well as the asking price. In the first group, sellers who mispriced cut and the rest still cleared over ask. Here, the premium thinned for everyone.
One market in Union County tells a simple story, and it is the only one that does. Mountainside is the single geography in the county where the typical home sold for less than its asking price — a 99.0% sale-to-list ratio, down 6.9 points year over year. Its share of homes selling above list fell 15.4 points to 38.5%, the lowest in the county, and its median sale price fell 10.3% to $1,032,008.
That 38.5% sits against 86.8% in the Berkeley Heights area, 83.4% in Roselle Park and 81.9% in New Providence. The gap between the top and the bottom of that list is the 48.3-point spread — and Mountainside is the entire bottom of it.
Mountainside is a borough of roughly 7,000 people. The Q3 2026 closing record runs to 27 sales for the whole quarter. At that volume a handful of large, slow, or atypical properties moves every ratio on the page. The direction is consistent across four separate measures, which is what makes it worth reading at all — but it is a small-sample signal and should be weighted as one.
Mountainside does not publish a price-cut share, and neither do Garwood, Fanwood, New Providence or Roselle Park. A blank is a blank: those five towns are not towns with zero price cuts, they are towns where the figure is not reported at the municipal level. Any county-wide claim about cuts in this piece is a claim about the fourteen markets that publish one.
Set against Mountainside, Garwood is the mirror image. Its above-list share rose 20.3 points — the largest single-market increase in the county — to 78.6%, while median days on market fell eighteen days to 18, on a sale-to-list ratio of 106.0%. Two small Union County boroughs, same quarter, opposite results. Both closing records are public and worth reading side by side before drawing a conclusion about either.
Twelve of the nineteen Union County markets were as fast or faster in September than a year earlier. That is not the profile of a market losing its buyers. Combine it with a price-cut share rising in eleven of the fourteen markets that publish one, and the conclusion is narrow and specific: buyers are still transacting at pace, and they are being more selective about the number at the top of the listing.
Which makes the first asking price the variable that decides which half of this market a seller lands in. Not the town. Not the price band — Summit and Elizabeth are on the same side of this split, and they share no comparable housing stock at all.
The share of homes selling above list is not a demand gauge. It is a measure of how often the asking price was set below what the market would bear. A town at 86% above list is not a town with more buyers than a town at 60%; it is a town where sellers and their agents have been pricing conservatively and letting the bidding settle it. When that share falls in a market whose days on market held steady, as it did in Springfield and the Union area, the likeliest reading is that asking prices caught up to the market, not that the market retreated.
Practically, this is what a split market does to a listing. A house priced to the last three months of comparable closings enters a county where sale-to-list ratios still run from 101% to 111%, and days on market are measured in weeks, not seasons. A house priced to a number from a year ago, or to a neighbor's asking price rather than a neighbor's closing price, enters a different county — one where the cut usually arrives after the first fortnight of attention has already been spent.
These figures run through September. They cannot be read as a response to the mortgage rate print that landed in the middle of October, and nothing here should be taken as measuring its effect. That is a separate question with a separate answer, and it is the subject of the companion piece to this one.
We price against closed comparables and current competing inventory in the same section of town, not against the county median or last year’s number. In a market this divided, the pricing decision is the listing strategy — everything after it is execution.
A pricing review against the last ninety days of closings in your section of town — not the county average, and not an automated estimate.
Does a rising share of price cuts mean Union County home prices are falling?
No. The price-cut share counts listings that lowered their asking price; it says nothing directly about what buyers paid. In September 2026 the Union County median sale price was $658,526, up 3.2% year over year, while the countywide price-cut share rose to 11.6%. Both moved up together. A cut measures the distance between an asking price and the market, not a change in the market itself.
How can price cuts and above-asking sales both rise in the same town?
Because they are measured on different listings. In Summit the price-cut share rose 13.3 points to 16.5% while the share of homes selling above list rose 12.6 points to 76.4%. Roughly three quarters of Summit sellers got more than they asked; a separate, smaller group had to reprice first. A single average hides that division. Westfield, Roselle, Elizabeth and Kenilworth showed the same pattern at different magnitudes.
Which Union County town had the highest share of price cuts in September 2026?
Kenilworth, at 28.0% — up 3 points year over year. It is also the market that improved most on speed: median days on market fell thirty-three days, from fifty-two to nineteen. Plainfield was next at 24.2%, and Rahway third at 21.9%. Five Union County towns — Mountainside, Garwood, Fanwood, New Providence and Roselle Park — do not publish a municipal price-cut share at all, so no ranking covers them.
Why does Mountainside look so different from the rest of Union County?
It was the only Union County market where the typical home sold below its asking price in September: a 99.0% sale-to-list ratio, down 6.9 points. Its above-list share fell 15.4 points to 38.5%, the lowest in the county, and its median sale price fell 10.3% to $1,032,008. Mountainside is a small borough with 27 recorded sales in the third quarter, so a handful of atypical properties moves every ratio. The direction is consistent across four measures, but it is a small-sample reading.
Are the ZIP-code figures in this report the same as the town figures?
No. Scotch Plains (07076), Clark (07066), Union (07083), Cranford (07016) and Berkeley Heights (07922) are reported by ZIP code because no comparable municipal row is published for them. ZIP boundaries are postal rather than municipal and can include homes outside the town line, so these are proxies for the area rather than the municipality's own figures. Hillside and Winfield are excluded entirely, having no comparable September row.
What does the share of homes sold above list price actually measure?
It measures how often the asking price was set below what the market would pay — a gauge of list-price accuracy, not of buyer demand. A market at 86.8% above list, as the Berkeley Heights area was, is one where sellers priced conservatively and let bidding settle the number. When that share falls while days on market hold steady, the likeliest reading is that asking prices caught up to the market rather than that the market retreated.
Westfield Q3 2026 home sales report · Cranford Q3 2026 home sales report · Clark Q3 2026 home sales report · Mountainside Q3 2026 home sales report · Garwood Q3 2026 home sales report · How to price your Summit home · Scotch Plains market update · Fanwood housing market · Union County towns by price · Westfield vs. Summit · Summit market report 2026 · Union County revaluation and ratio map
Sources and method. Market figures for all nineteen geographies — median days on market, share of listings with a price drop, sale-to-list ratio, share sold above list price and median sale price, each with its year-over-year change — were read directly from the Redfin housing-market pages for each municipality, ZIP code and for Union County, and were verified in-browser on October 20, 2026 against the September 2026 reporting month. Five municipalities publish no price-cut share and are reported as unpublished rather than zero. Five areas are reported by ZIP code where no municipal row exists. Hillside and Winfield are excluded for want of a comparable row. Third-quarter closing counts and medians referenced for Westfield, Mountainside and Garwood come from The Prodigy Team’s own multi-source closing records for those boroughs. Figures describe September 2026 and are not adjusted for events after the reporting month.
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