Westchester County's Median Price Is Hiding Two Different Housing Markets

If you pulled two headline numbers out of Westchester County's first-quarter 2026 sales data, you'd think you were looking at two different states. One report on the county's northern towns showed home prices up about 5 percent. A second report, covering towns barely twenty minutes away, showed prices up closer to 18 percent. Both clusters had almost identical drops in the number of homes that actually sold. So why did one price number run nearly four times higher than the other?

The honest answer isn't that one part of the county got hot while the other cooled off. It's a statistical quirk that shows up whenever sales volume falls in a tight market, and once you see it, you start reading every county press release differently.

Two Reports, Same Quarter, Very Different Stories

A Q1 2026 regional brokerage report split Westchester, Putnam and Dutchess counties into named sub-regions rather than reporting one flat county number, and the two clusters that matter most for anyone comparing towns in this part of Westchester sit right next to each other on the map.

The first cluster, grouped as Northern Westchester, covers Bedford, Byram Hills, Chappaqua, Katonah-Lewisboro, North Salem and Somers. Homes sold there fell 16 percent year over year in the first quarter, while the median sale price rose about 5 percent.

The second cluster, Northwest Westchester, covers Croton-on-Hudson, Hendrick Hudson, Lakeland, Peekskill and Yorktown. Homes sold fell 18 percent, almost the same drop as its neighbor. But the median sale price there jumped roughly 18 percent, more than three times the pace of the cluster next door.

Zoom out to the whole county and the picture gets blurrier still. Westchester overall saw sales fall 16 percent in the same quarter, with the average sale price reaching $1.3 million, up 11 percent. That county number sits neatly between the two cluster numbers, which is exactly the problem. A buyer skimming the countywide figure would never guess that two adjoining pockets of the same county were telling such different stories underneath it.

Why a Smaller Stack of Sales Moves the Median More

A median is just the middle value among whatever homes actually closed that quarter. When 200 homes sell across a cluster of towns, one high-end colonial closing for well above the norm barely nudges the number. When only 60 or 70 homes close across five towns, that same colonial can drag the median up several percentage points on its own, even if every other closing that quarter priced in line with the year before.

This is exactly the kind of pattern that shows up in Northwest Westchester repeatedly, not because the towns keep getting randomly lucky, but because that cluster tends to see fewer total transactions than the Sound Shore towns or the larger Northern Westchester grouping. Fewer closings means each one carries more weight in the math.

The pattern isn't new. A second-quarter report comparing 2014 sales to the same quarter in 2013 covered the same five towns now grouped together as Northwest Westchester: Croton-on-Hudson, Hendrick Hudson, Lakeland, Peekskill and Yorktown. The combined median across all five ticked up just 1 percent that quarter, a number that looked calm sitting on its own. Underneath it, Croton's median jumped 23 percent, Yorktown's rose 19 percent, Peekskill's climbed 7 percent, and Hendrick Hudson's single-family prices fell 22 percent, all in the same three-month window. A blended figure of 1 percent hid a swing of roughly 45 percentage points between the best and worst performing towns in that same cluster. During the COVID-era surge in 2020, the cluster flipped the other direction: while demand spiked hard across most of the county, this same Northwest Westchester grouping posted one of the region's quieter gains, with sales down 10 percent and median price up only 2 percent. The cluster runs hot in some cycles and cool in others, and each time the swing traces back to how few sales it takes to move a median calculated from a small pool.

A cluster of five or six towns can behave like a single loud data point instead of a stable trend line. That's the tradeoff every reader of a sub-region report is making without realizing it.

What Northern Westchester Actually Buys, Town by Town

The Northern Westchester label carries the same problem inside it. Bedford, Katonah-Lewisboro, North Salem and Somers get reported as one grouping, but recent county assessment data compiled by ATTOM shows the towns inside that grouping sit at genuinely different price points per square foot.

That's a spread of more than $140 per square foot between the highest and lowest towns in a grouping that gets reported as a single 5 percent gain. Katonah's older housing stock and estate-era parcels carry a different cost basis than Somers, where more of the inventory reflects later-era subdivision construction. A cluster-level headline can't capture that, and it isn't supposed to. It's built for regional trend reporting, not for comparing what a specific budget buys on a specific street.

What This Means If You're Comparing These Towns

Inventory context makes this worth taking seriously right now rather than filing away for later. A February 2026 county report found Westchester carrying just 1.3 months of single-family inventory, down from 1.9 months a year earlier, with active listings down 29 percent year over year. When the total pool of closings shrinks that much, the small-sample effect described above gets stronger, not weaker. Every closing that does happen carries more statistical influence over whatever percentage change gets printed in the next quarterly report.

For anyone comparing Bedford to Somers, or Katonah to Yorktown, the practical move is to stop treating the cluster percentage as the answer and start treating it as a prompt to ask a narrower question. What did homes actually close for in that specific town over the last few months, and what did they cost per square foot? A town-level pull of recent closed comps, not the sub-region press release, is what actually tells a buyer or seller whether a specific market moved.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does a higher median price growth number mean a town's home values are rising faster? Not on its own. It can mean a handful of higher-priced homes closed that quarter while most of the market held close to flat. Price per square foot and days on market, tracked at the town level, give a cleaner read than a percentage change built on a small number of sales.

Is one of these two clusters simply a better place to buy right now? The cluster labels don't answer that question. They describe a batch of towns bundled together for reporting purposes, not a shared market condition. A meaningful comparison has to happen town by town, and often street by street, within the specific price band a buyer is actually shopping.

How often does this kind of split show up in Westchester? The Northwest Westchester cluster in particular has shown this pattern before, diverging sharply within itself in 2014 and swinging the opposite direction during the 2020 surge. It tends to recur whenever transaction volume drops far enough that a handful of closings can swing the local median.

If you're weighing Bedford against Somers, or trying to understand what a specific Katonah or Yorktown address is really worth against this quarter's headlines, that's a conversation worth having with someone who reads the town-level data every week, not just the press release. Durr Palumbo Partners works across these exact towns and can walk you through what the numbers mean for your specific street. Request a Home Valuation to start with real comps instead of a cluster average.