Most real estate writing opens with a figure and moves on. This one starts with the provenance instead, because the provenance is what decides whether the figure means anything.
The listing pages on this site are built directly on an MLS feed. The feed refreshes continuously, and the pages redraw from it — which is why a price change shows up here without anyone editing a page. It is also why there are whole categories of number you will not find on this site, and why we would rather explain the gap than fill it.
What the feed carries
An IDX feed is a feed of active inventory. For each home currently on the market it carries the things a listing agent entered: address, price, bedroom and bathroom counts, living area, property type, photographs, remarks, the listing brokerage, and a timestamp for the last change.
From that you can honestly answer a specific class of question:
- What is on the market in this city today?
- What does the middle of that range cost?
- How large is a typical home in that sample, and what does it cost per square foot?
- Which brokerage is representing the seller on a given home?
Every statistic on our area pages is one of those — a median over the homes we are marketing in that city, as they stand today. When the sample is too small to say anything, the tile is left off the page rather than filled in.
What the feed does not carry
An active-listing feed goes quiet the moment a home leaves the market. It does not carry the sale price, the closing date, how long the home sat, or how the final number compared to the asking price.
That means the four figures buyers most often see quoted — sales volume, median days on market, list-to-sale ratio, and last quarter's closed sales — are not derivable from anything on this site. We do not estimate them, and we do not print them. A number with no source behind it is worse than a blank space, because a blank space does not pretend.
Where the missing numbers actually live
They exist. They are simply held somewhere else: in the MLS's sold records, which licensed agents and brokers can access directly on your behalf.
So the honest division of labour is this. Use these pages for what is available now — inventory, asking prices, size, location, who is representing the seller. Ask an agent for anything that requires knowing how a sale ended. A conversation that starts "here are the three homes I want to understand" is a far better use of an agent's market access than a dashboard that guesses.
How to read a median
When you do read a median on this site, two habits are worth keeping.
Check the sample. A median over four homes describes four homes. It is a fact about a small group, not a forecast about a city. We publish the count of listings alongside the medians for exactly this reason.
Prefer the median to the average. One unusually expensive property drags an average a long way and a median barely at all. Medians are what we compute here, which makes them stubborn in a useful way — the number moves when the market moves, not when one estate lists.
Why we are strict about this
The temptation to round out a market report with a plausible-sounding statistic is real, and it is exactly the wrong instinct for a page that a buyer or a seller is going to make a decision against. Everything on this site is either pulled from the live feed or entered by the brokerage. Nothing is inferred, and nothing is invented.
If a number matters to your decision and it is not here, that is not an oversight. It is the boundary of what this data can support — and the right next step is a conversation with the agent whose name is on the page.
Written by
SH Digital Group
Editorial
General information for buyers and sellers — not legal, tax, or lending advice. Confirm the specifics of your own transaction with your agent and, where appropriate, a licensed attorney.