Search "Pelham NY home prices" this summer and the results argue with each other. The median sale price of a home in Pelham was $1.5M in March 2026, up 38.3% since the year before, according to Redfin's tracking. Pull up Zillow around the same time and you get a different story: the site's home value index put Pelham's average at $1,073,226, up a comparatively modest 2.7% over the past year. Same village. Two figures a few hundred thousand dollars apart, with growth rates that differ by a factor of fourteen.
Neither number is wrong. They are measuring different slices of a market too small to average out its own noise. If you are comparing Pelham to Larchmont, Rye, or any other Sound Shore village this year, understanding why the headline figures disagree matters more than memorizing any single one of them.
The Math Behind the Confusion
Pelham's monthly sales counts are tiny, and tiny denominators make wild swings. There were 4 homes sold in March 2026, up from 3 the year before, per Redfin's own count. A market that closes four homes in a month will report a median that moves by six figures the instant one large or small sale lands. Movoto's own count, pulled two months later in May 2026, was built on 69 sales, a reminder that these trackers rarely cover the same window or the same set of transactions even when they're describing the same village.
Here is what each tracker was showing within a few months of each other in 2026:
| Source | Period | Reported Figure | Year-Over-Year Change | Homes Counted |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Redfin | March 2026 | $1.5M median sale price | +38.3% | 4 |
| Movoto | May 2026 | $1,422,500 median sold price | not reported | 69 |
| Zillow (ZHVI) | mid-2026 | $1,073,226 average home value | +2.7% | smoothed index, no count given |
| William Pitt Sotheby's Market Tracker | April 2026 | $661 per square foot | +12.2% | not reported |
Four different answers to what sounds like one simple question. None of these trackers are lying. They are each doing arithmetic on a pool so small that a single closing at the high or low end reshapes the result.
The Annual Picture Is Steadier, and It Tells a Different Story
Zoom out to a full year instead of a single month and the noise settles. It was another banner year in 2025 for the Pelham real estate market. Inventory remained relatively low, and demand remained strong, pushing prices higher again and generating a very brisk sales pace, according to the Best Version Media Year-End 2025 Pelham Real Estate Market Report. The total number of Pelham single-family homes sold in 2025 increased by 20% year over year from 81 in 2024 to 99, though total sales in 2025 were still 30% lower than the 145 single-family homes sold back in 2021.
That gap between "more sales than last year" and "far fewer sales than four years ago" is the real story. Demand has not softened. The pool of houses available to buy has shrunk, and it has shrunk for years running.
With that backdrop, the price data starts to make sense. With inventory remaining historically low and demand not slackening, average and median prices per square foot rose again, setting new records at $588 and $615, up from $528 and $537 in 2024. With demand still outstripping supply, the sale-to-list ratio rose to a median sale price that was 5% over the asking price, up more than a full percentage point from 2024, and sales velocity remained as fast-paced as in 2024, with a median of just 15 days on the market from listing to contract signing. Even a stock market wobble barely dented it. Except for a dip in April 2025 coinciding with what became known as the Tariff Tantrum, the number of bids on Pelham homes stayed generally higher than in 2024.
None of those figures bounce around the way the monthly medians do. Price per square foot, days to contract, and sale-to-list ratio are all built to shrug off a single outlier sale in a way a raw median cannot.
Where the Real Constraint Sits: Six Houses for the Whole Village
Here is the number that explains everything above it. Heading into 2026, the supply of Pelham homes for sale may have set a new low. As of the last week of January 2026, there were a grand total of six single-family homes on the market in Pelham, ranging in price from $1.2M to $3.35M.
Six homes. For an entire village. When the active pool is that thin, the closing of even one property near either end of that range does not nudge the month's median, it reshuffles it entirely. That is the mechanism behind the numbers in the table above. It is not a data error. It is what a market looks like when transaction counts get small enough that ordinary statistics stop behaving the way they do in a bigger pool.
Part of why that pool stays thin is structural. Pelham Manor's own zoning code names the pressure directly: the village's building rules have been updated to address excessive lot coverage, "McMansions," "teardowns," and home offices. Redevelopment that would otherwise add larger or additional single-family homes to a tight lot faces real friction before a shovel goes in the ground.
Meanwhile, the one large residential project moving through downtown addresses a different kind of housing entirely. Hudson Inc., in partnership with Excelsior Housing Group and Sisca Northeast, is developing a new 127-unit rental building in the Village of Pelham's downtown corridor, and the development will also add municipal parking and three new retail spaces to the Village's downtown, including a corner space with the potential to be used as a restaurant. That is meaningful new housing stock and welcome new downtown retail. It does nothing, though, to loosen the count of detached homes available to a family hunting for a yard, because none of those 127 units will ever appear in a single-family sales report.
What This Means If You're Comparing Pelham To Another Village
If you are weighing Pelham against Larchmont, Mamaroneck, or Rye based on a headline price you saw on a portal, that comparison is only as good as the sample size behind it. A trailing twelve-month figure from a report like Best Version Media's will tell you more than any single month pulled from a national aggregator.
Watch three things instead of the median:
- Price per square foot over a full year, since it normalizes for home size and absorbs a single outlier better than a raw median. Pelham's 2025 figure of $615 median per square foot was a record, not a blip.
- Days from listing to signed contract, which measures competitive pace regardless of price tier. Fifteen days in 2025 tells you buyers were moving fast on whatever came up.
- The active listing count at the moment you're shopping, because six homes village-wide is a real, recent data point, not a hypothetical worst case.
It also helps to hold Pelham up against the wider state. The median sales price rose 8 percent year-over-year, increasing from $440,000 in June 2025 to a record $475,000 in June 2026 across New York, and the New York State Association of REALTORS® reported that housing inventory continued its steady climb for the 16th consecutive month statewide. That is a market where supply is loosening and prices are climbing in an orderly, predictable line. Pelham is running the opposite pattern: near-record price per square foot alongside a supply of active listings that keeps setting new lows. A village this small does not follow the state's curve, and treating it like it does will leave you chasing a number that was never built for the comparison.
The texture on the ground backs this up. A Pelhamwood home on Fraser Street picked up a mention in the New York Times real estate section this spring, while listings near Pelham Country Club and in Marbury Corners each sit in very different price tiers within the same six-home snapshot from January. One village, several distinct micro-markets, and a single median that can't do justice to any of them.
A Few Common Questions
Is Pelham a buyer's market or a seller's market right now? The 2025 data points firmly toward sellers. A median sale-to-list ratio of 105 percent and a 15-day median time to contract both describe a market where competitive bidding is the norm, not the exception.
How many homes are typically for sale in Pelham at once? It varies by season, but the last week of January 2026 saw the pool bottom out at six single-family listings village-wide, ranging from $1.2 million to $3.35 million.
Should I trust the home value estimate I see on a listing portal? Treat it as a starting point, not a conclusion. As the table above shows, four different trackers produced four different figures within a few months of each other. A trailing twelve-month view of price per square foot, sourced from actual closed sales, will always tell you more than a single portal's snapshot.
Reading Pelham's real estate data takes more than a search bar. If you want the trailing-year numbers, the current active count, and a read on how they apply to your specific move, Jennifer Jaffe can walk through it with you. Schedule a Local Market Consultation and get a picture of the market that a headline price never could.
