Whether July's price-cut wave applies to you depends on your price band. The gap is wide.
The DeSilva Team — Northern NJ Real Estate Weekly
The statewide reduction number everyone is quoting is real. Measured against my own data through this week, whether it applies to your house depends almost entirely on your price band.
Freddie Mac's weekly survey printed 6.67% on Thursday, against 6.69% the week before and 6.58% a year ago. Sam Khater's read was that borrowers are responding to even modest moves, with purchase and refinance applications both rising into a rate that is higher than it was last summer. The ten-year Treasury was at 4.74% at the start of the month, and because mortgage rates track the ten-year rather than the Fed funds rate directly, that is the number worth watching as September gets priced. Nothing in the past month has moved enough to change anyone's payment math.
The rate isn't the variable this month. Your price band is.
The number making the rounds is 5,270 — New Jersey listings whose sellers cut the price in the last full month on record, nearly 20% more than the same month last year, against 20,021 active listings and a 42-day average time on market. On its own it tells one story: supply building, sellers giving ground.
The problem is that it averages price bands behaving nothing alike. Two of the five statewide tiers have lost ground this year, and the steepest decline — about 10% — is in the tier under $400,000, where affordability breaks first and a rate in the mid-sixes does the most damage to a monthly payment. The $1 million to $2.5 million band went the other way, up 12%, the strongest of the five. Same state, same month, same rate, opposite direction. So the useful question is never whether the market is cutting prices. It's whether your band is.
Here is one band measured through this week rather than last month. Morris County, single-family, $1.5 to $2 million — the numbers are below. Eighty-one closings against ninety a year ago reads like a 10% slowdown until you look at the rest of it: prices up, time-to-contract down, and the share of homes selling at or above asking up nearly twenty points. Fewer sales, faster, at higher prices, against materially more competition. That is what a shortage looks like, not a slowdown.
Run the same exercise at the other end and the answer flips, which is the whole point. If you are shopping below a million dollars, that reduction figure is largely describing your market — the cuts are weighted toward the bands where buyers have gone quiet, and that genuinely is leverage worth using. Above a million and a half, it is describing houses that are not yours. The number is true and close to useless until somebody breaks it apart.
• 81 closings so far this year, against 90 through the same date last year
• Median sale price up from $1,750,000 to $1,800,000 · • Median days to contract down from 19 to 15 · • Closing at or above asking: 63.3% last year, 82.7% this year · • 30 on the market right now — and 33 already under contract
GSMLS, single-family, both windows January 1 through mid-August. Pulled 8/14/26.
A statewide average is one number describing two markets — and only one of them is yours.
This week's example is 127 Waughaw Road, in the Towaco section of Montville — and it is not my listing. I am using it because it makes the point better than anything I have on. It's a 2003 custom home on 3.61 acres: six bedrooms, sixteen rooms, two fireplaces, a finished walkout lower level, and a backyard built around an in-ground pool with a spa and waterfalls, a few minutes from the Towaco train. It is asking $1,980,000, which puts it at the very top of the band I have been describing. It has been on the market 77 days.
That 77 is the number worth sitting with, because the median home in this band closed in fifteen days. Both are true, and they measure different populations. Of the homes that actually closed in the band this year, only 4% took sixty days or longer. Of the thirty-two available right now, 41% have been listed sixty days or more, and the median one has been on for forty-four. The quick sales are what closes; the slower houses are what remains to look at. For a buyer that inverts the usual advice — in a band where more than four in five closings land at or above asking, the negotiable inventory is the inventory still sitting. And three and a half private acres has a smaller natural buyer pool than a colonial four blocks from the Midtown Direct. That isn't a flaw in the house; it's arithmetic, and it's where a patient buyer has room to work.
In a band where four in five closings beat asking, the houses still sitting are the only ones you can negotiate on.
So: stop reading the state number and find out what your own band is doing before you decide anything. If it's cutting, patience is a real strategy — use it. If it isn't, waiting for a reduction that four out of five sellers no longer need to make is just paying more later. I can run your band and your towns off this week's data in about ten minutes, and it's usually the difference between a decision and a guess.
Before you decide anything this fall, find out what your own band is doing — not what the state average says.
Buyers: want to see what your price band and your towns are actually doing, and every reduction the day it posts? I'll set you up on the private MLS feed. Reply FEED and I’ll send it over.
Sellers: want to know where your own house prices against the last sixty days rather than last spring? I'll run it. Reply VALUE and I’ll send it over.
Sources: Bankrate 30-yr fixed — direction check only, not quoted · Freddie Mac PMMS, survey week ending 2026-08-13 (6.67%) · Latest monthly NJ statewide read (July release, Realtor.com data via NorthJersey.com) · HousingWire Housing Market Tracker, 2026-08-01 · Otteau Group HousingTRAC, Morris County, June 2026 release · GSMLS pulls, Morris County single-family $1.5M–$2M, 2026 YTD and 2025 YTD (Eric, 8/14/26) · GSMLS listing 4030923 — 127 Waughaw Rd, Montville Twp. (listed by Sally E. Novak)
Eric DeSilva · The DeSilva Team at eXp Realty · 973-542-9302 · hello@thedesilvateam.com
Figures in this edition reflect data as of the original send date above and are not updated retroactively; treat this as dated market commentary, not a current snapshot. Rate and market data as cited in the original edition; imported from The DeSilva Team's newsletter archive.