Bidding Wars "Cooled" This Summer? That's Not Quite What Happened

You've probably heard it somewhere this summer: the bidding wars are over, buyers finally have room to breathe, sellers are giving back ground. It's a reasonable thing to believe. It's just not what the sold data shows.

Here's what the data actually says. Over the twelve weeks ending August 30, 2026, 77% of homes across the territory sold for more than the asking price. That's not a handful of standout listings. That's more than three out of every four homes that closed.

And it wasn't a matter of buyers reluctantly meeting sellers partway. The median sale-to-list ratio across the territory came in at 115%, meaning the typical home sold well above its list price, not just even with it. Homes are also moving at a decent clip, with a median of about 55 days on market across the whole territory.

So where does the "cooling" feeling come from? It's not baseless. If you zoom into individual towns, the picture gets more textured, and a few places really are giving buyers more leverage than they had a year ago.

Take Henrietta. The median sale price there rose to about 2% above where it stood a year earlier. In that same stretch, the average sale-to-list ratio there is down about 5 percentage points. Homes in Henrietta are still selling for more, but sellers there are conceding more to get the deal done than they used to.

Rochester's 14616 area tells a similar story. Median sale price rose to about 4% above a year earlier. The average sale-to-list ratio in that same market has slipped roughly 2 percentage points. Again: prices climbing, seller leverage easing a little at the same time.

And in the 14609 section of Rochester, the median sale price rose to about 2% above a year ago. The average sale-to-list ratio there is down about 2 percentage points over that same stretch. Same pattern, third neighborhood.

So the "cooling" narrative isn't wrong everywhere. It's just not the territory-wide story the headline numbers tell. Some towns are seeing sellers give a little more room even as prices tick up. Others are still commanding well over asking with barely a pause.

That inconsistency is itself worth noticing. Speed on the market is a good example of just how different two nearby towns can look inside the same market. Henrietta's median time to pending runs about 36 days. Penfield's runs about 12 days. Those are neighboring markets in the same broader territory, moving at completely different speeds.

What does this mean if you're thinking about buying or selling? If you're selling in a town where sale-to-list has been sliding, don't assume you can name any price and watch offers pour in. Price it where the recent sales actually landed. If you're buying in one of those towns, you may have a bit more room to negotiate than the headline "still 77% over asking" number suggests.

If you're selling somewhere like Penfield, where homes are moving to pending in about 12 days, don't expect buyers to take their time deciding. That's a fast-moving market, full stop.

What I'll be watching next: whether that sale-to-list softening in Henrietta and the two Rochester ZIPs keeps drifting, or whether it holds steady from here. One period of movement is a data point. A second one in the same direction is a trend worth planning around.

This update is built on MLS sold data for the territory. If you want to know what any of this means for your specific street, I'm happy to walk through it.

Scott