"The best answer that I come up with in real estate is, 'It depends,'" says Lindsay Hart, the broker who leads the Hart & Homes Team at RE/MAX In Motion. She was talking about Tompkins County's housing market, and she wasn't dodging the question. She was describing the only honest answer to it.
Here's why that matters if you're the one comparing towns right now. Tompkins County has a widely quoted median sale price, a figure hovering around $376,750 for 2025 residential sales, according to calculations Hart shared with Tompkins Weekly. That number gets repeated on portal pages and in casual conversation as if it describes a single market. It doesn't. It's an average pulled from at least nine towns that move at completely different speeds and price points, and the gap between the fastest and slowest of them is wide enough to change how you should approach an offer.
The Same County, Nine Different Speeds
Warren Real Estate's 2026 Ithaca Market Report, built from 2025 sales data and summarized by Tompkins Weekly in March, breaks the county down by town. Put the numbers side by side and the "Tompkins County market" stops looking like one thing.
| Town | 2025 Sales | Median Price | Price/Sq Ft | Median Days on Market |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Town of Ithaca | 148 | $477,500 | $228 (highest in county) | 9 |
| Lansing | 112 | $510,000 | $213 | 10 |
| City of Ithaca | 136 | $405,000 | $220 | 11 |
| Ulysses (Trumansburg area) | 49 | $349,900 | $220 | 9 |
| Caroline | 31 | $335,000 | $195 | 6 (fastest) |
| Dryden | 116 | $327,500 | $177 | 11 |
| Danby | 37 | $299,000 | $191 | 9 |
| Enfield | 26 | $290,500 | $165 | 20 |
| Newfield | 43 | $265,000 | $163.50 | 33 (slowest) |
| Groton | 38 | $237,500 | $139 (lowest in county) | 9 |
A buyer who anchors on the county median and starts looking in Lansing will underbid by tens of thousands of dollars. A buyer who anchors on that same median and looks in Newfield will overbid, possibly by a lot, in a town where homes sit for a month rather than a week and a half.
Hart's read on 2025 is that the county didn't get cheaper, it recalibrated at a higher level after the pandemic years. Countywide, 736 non-waterfront residential properties sold, 35% of buyers paid cash, and the average list-to-sell ratio landed at 100%. That last figure tells you sellers are getting what they ask, not more, not less, which is a very different market than the bidding-war years but still not a soft one.
Why Groton Can't Catch Up
The obvious question is why Groton stays cheap and Lansing doesn't just even out over time as buyers chase the better deal. The answer isn't about the towns themselves. It's about what isn't getting built anywhere in the county.
Tompkins County set a ten-year goal in 2017 to add 3,800 new workforce-affordable single-family homes and 2,000 affordable rentals by 2025. According to the county's 2024 Housing Snapshot, released in early 2026, developers had completed 666 ownership units, a fraction of the target. At an Aug. 12 housing panel held on Trumansburg Road, County Housing and Community Development Director David West confirmed the shortfall still stands, and panelists pointed to zoning rules, long approval timelines, and land costs as the main barriers. Assemblymember Anna Kelles urged residents at the panel to show up and support housing proposals at local government meetings, which is a fair signal of how unresolved this still is.
One county planning official summed up the mechanism plainly in an earlier report on the shortfall: new construction in Tompkins County and its neighbors is overwhelmingly custom homes rather than homes built to sell, because the market rate for existing homes sits so far below what it costs to build new. That single sentence explains a lot of what's in the table above. If it costs more to build a house in Groton than a buyer will pay for one there, no developer builds one, and the town's inventory stays whatever the existing housing stock happens to be. The same logic holds in Newfield and Enfield. Meanwhile Lansing and the Town of Ithaca, where buyers will pay more per square foot, are the places where new construction pencils out, if it happens at all.
This is also why Ithaca's improved rental vacancy rate, now between 6% and 8% according to officials at the same panel, hasn't done much to change the ownership picture. More market-rate apartments ease rental pressure. They don't produce the entry-level, for-sale houses that would let Groton or Newfield prices drift toward the county average.
The School District Numbers Tell the Same Story a Different Way
Warren's 2026 report also groups 2025 sales by school district, which in this county functions mostly as a shorthand for location rather than a judgment on any district's quality. The pattern matches the town data closely. Cayuga Heights led at an average sale price of $673,545 across 58 homes. Lansing followed at $571,216 across 88 homes, then Northeast Ithaca at $513,862 across 36 homes, then Belle Sherman at $452,077 across 58 homes. On the other end, Newfield averaged $273,593 across 44 homes and Groton averaged $272,049 across 20 homes.
Line that up against the town-level figures and you get the same conclusion twice: this county's price map has real, durable boundaries, and they track the towns, not a countywide trend line.
What This Means If You're Comparing Two Towns
If you're weighing Ulysses against Groton, or Lansing against Newfield, the number that should worry you more than the median is the days-on-market column.
Hart expects the tighter submarkets, Caroline, Ulysses, Lansing, and both parts of Ithaca, to hold inventory in the 2.5 to 3.5 month range through 2026, with days on market staying in the 8 to 15 day window. That's not a market where you get a second look. Come preapproved, have your inspector on call, and expect to make a decision within days of a showing if the house is priced right and in good condition.
In Newfield, Enfield, and Groton, the calculus flips. A 33-day median in Newfield and a 20-day median in Enfield mean sellers there need realistic pricing and strong presentation to move a home, even though it will likely still sell at or near list. For a buyer, that's more room to negotiate on timeline, inspection contingencies, or closing costs, not necessarily on price itself, since the list-to-sell ratio held at 100% countywide in 2025.
Hart's advice to sellers doubles as useful advice for buyers trying to read a listing correctly: "Unless you want to take a full three months off of your job to work on your house full-time to get it ready for market, talk to all the buyers, then schedule all the showings and do everything, hire a realtor because that's really what we do." The pace difference between a 6-day town and a 33-day town isn't something a portal search will surface for you. It shows up in how a listing is priced, staged, and negotiated, and that's exactly where local guidance earns its keep.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does a low median price in a town like Groton mean the homes are lower quality? Not based on the data available. The price-per-square-foot gap between Groton ($139) and the Town of Ithaca ($228) reflects location and demand more than condition. Housing stock varies within every town, which is exactly why a walkthrough and inspection matter more than the town median.
Will new construction bring the higher-priced towns back down? The county's own housing snapshot and the panel discussion in August 2026 both point the other way. Construction costs currently exceed what most existing homes sell for across the county, which is why new building has concentrated in custom homes rather than resale inventory. Absent a shift in zoning, land costs, or construction economics, that gap isn't expected to close soon.
Is the county median price useless, then? It's useful for tracking the county's overall direction year over year. It's the wrong number to budget against for a specific search. The town-level and school-district breakdowns in Warren's 2026 report are the more honest starting point.
If you're trying to figure out which corner of Tompkins County actually fits your budget and your timeline, that's a conversation worth having before you start touring houses, not after you've fallen for one. Vicki Schamel has spent more than 30 years reading exactly this kind of town-by-town variation across the Finger Lakes and Southern Tier. Reach out for a complimentary consultation or a free home valuation, and get a read on your specific target town before the next listing hits the market.
