Rochester-Area Sellers Are Getting More for Their Homes, and Giving More Back to Get There

Over the twelve weeks ending August 23, 2026, sale prices climbed from a year earlier in Spencerport, Henrietta and two pockets of Rochester, even as the share of asking price sellers actually collected slipped in every one of them.

A year ago, if you owned a house in Spencerport and put it on the market, you were probably going to get a bidding war. Buyers weren't just meeting the asking price, they were blowing past it.

That part of the story hasn't gone away everywhere. But look closely at the same handful of markets today and something has shifted underneath the good news.

Start with Spencerport. The median sale price there is up about 20% year over year, easily one of the bigger moves in the territory this period. That's the kind of number a seller wants to see.

Here's the part underneath it. A year ago, the average sale-to-list ratio in Spencerport was about 115%, meaning the typical home sold for well above what it was listed at. This period, that ratio has come down to about 106%. Homes are still selling above list. They're just not selling as far above list as they were.

Henrietta is telling almost the identical story. Median sale price there is up about 8% year over year. At the same time, sellers who a year ago were collecting close to 119% of asking are now closing deals around 112%.

Prices went up in both towns. The margin on top of the asking price went down in both towns, too.

That's not a contradiction. It's two different questions getting two different answers. "Did homes get more valuable?" Yes, in both places, clearly. "Are sellers in as strong a bargaining position as they were a year ago?" A little less so, in both places, just as clearly.

It shows up on a smaller scale elsewhere, too. In one Rochester market, the median sale price is up about 3% year over year, while the average sale-to-list ratio slipped by roughly 5 percentage points over the same stretch. Another Rochester market moved almost the same way: sale prices up about 3%, sale-to-list down close to 3 percentage points. Smaller swings than Spencerport or Henrietta, but the same direction.

None of this means sellers are losing. A price that keeps climbing year over year is still a real gain for the homeowner, and a home selling above its asking price is still a strong outcome. What it means is that the extra push buyers were willing to add on top of an already strong price is not as automatic as it was a year ago.

If you're thinking about listing in one of these towns, that matters for how you price. A year ago, an aggressive list price still got chased up further by competing offers. This period, that cushion is thinner. Pricing closer to what the home is actually worth, rather than leaving room for a bidding war to do the work, looks like the more reliable path to a strong number.

If you're buying, it means an asking price is a little less likely to be treated as the floor for negotiation than it was a year ago, even in a market where prices themselves keep climbing. That's worth knowing before you write an offer that assumes you have to beat everyone else in the room.

What I'll be watching over the next reporting period is whether this sale-to-list slide continues or steadies out. If it keeps drifting further toward the break-even point between asking price and sale price, that's a market correcting itself toward balance. If it holds close to where it sits now, this period may turn out to be the new normal rather than a stop along the way to something else.

These figures come from MLS sold data at the ZIP level, gathered through Listing Leads, covering the twelve weeks ending August 23, 2026.

If you own in Spencerport, Henrietta, or either of the Rochester pockets mentioned here and want to talk through what this means for your specific street, I'm always happy to help.

Scott