Mortgage rates have settled into the mid-6s and stayed there. The 30-year fixed is averaging around 6.5% this week — essentially flat over the past month and roughly a third of a point below where it sat a year ago. The headlines are still about geopolitical noise and stubborn inflation, but for a homeowner weighing a summer sale, the rate story is quieter than it sounds. Buyers in your price band have adjusted to this range, and they are still showing up.

If you own a home in Essex County worth somewhere between $600,000 and $1 million, the data runs against the national mood. This is not a soft market. Through the first five months of the year, single-family homes in that band sold in a median of fifteen days — the same pace as last spring — and 85% of them closed at or above asking. The median sale landed at roughly 109% of list price. In plain terms, the typical home in your range is still drawing competing offers and selling for about nine percent over where it was priced.

That strength has a shelf life, and the reason is supply. Statewide, unsold inventory is up 13% from a year ago and 39% since January, with more than 18,000 homes on the market now — the fastest build of this cycle. Essex is still tight at about 2.2 months of supply, and there are actually more homes under contract today than sitting active. But the cushion is thinning, and you can see where: a quarter of the active listings in your band have been on the market longer than thirty days. In a tier where the median home goes in two weeks, sitting for a month is not bad luck. It is a pricing signal.

That is the whole game this summer. Demand in the $600K–$1M range is genuine and competitive, but a rising-inventory market is far less forgiving of an aspirational list price than the frenzy of two years ago was. The homes selling fast, and over ask, are the ones priced to invite the competition — not the ones priced to a number the owner hoped for. When a home launches above where comparable sales would naturally carry it, the bidding that lifts everyone else never starts, and the listing quietly joins the stale tail while sharper-priced homes trade around it.

A storybook Tudor on a corner lot in the Yantacaw section, built in 1930 and carrying its era's character into a modern kitchen with a center island, a family room with soaring ceilings and a gas fireplace, three bedrooms up, and a finished basement. A paver patio and fenced yard make the case for summer evenings. It is a genuinely lovely house — and a live lesson in everything above. It came to market at $935,000 and has since been repositioned to $899,000, with a public open house this Saturday from noon to two. That move is exactly the discipline this environment rewards: rather than wait out a number, the seller has met the market where Essex buyers are actually transacting. Watch what the open house does — in a fifteen-day market, the right price plus foot traffic is how a listing goes from sitting to sold.

If you have been waiting for the perfect moment to sell, it is closer than the headlines suggest — but the advantage now belongs to sellers who price to today's data, not last year's. Inventory is rising, buyers are still competing, and the gap between those two facts is decided almost entirely at the list price.

Buyers: want to see what's actually moving in your range before it reaches the public sites? Reply with feed and I'll open a private MLS feed for you.

Sellers: want to know exactly where your home lands in this market? Reply with value for a current, no-obligation valuation.

The DeSilva Team • eXp Realty • hello@thedesilvateam.com • 973-542-9302

Tier-level figures from Garden State MLS (GSMLS), Essex County single-family $600K–$1M, current as of June 5, 2026. County and statewide inventory context: Otteau Group HousingTRAC.