Mid-year data from six northern New Jersey towns shows buyer demand diverging sharply by submarket, with some neighborhoods accelerating into summer while others have shifted toward buyer advantage.

Broad statements about the state of the real estate market tend to obscure more than they reveal. According to Mark Slade, a real estate professional with the Mark Slade Homes Team at Keller Williams, the mid-year snapshot across the six northern New Jersey towns he tracks tells a story no single headline can capture – because the towns are moving in opposite directions simultaneously.

As of the most recent weekly reading, Maplewood’s Hyper Market Index – a ratio of under-contract properties to new listings – sits at 1.9, the highest of any town Slade monitors. South Orange follows at 1.8. Livingston, by contrast, has fallen to 0.6, well below the 1.0 threshold Slade uses to define a hyper market. The overall average across the six towns has dipped from 1.2 a month ago to 1.1 now.

Slade says the data shows “positive and negative trends for some of the same towns at the same time.” A buyer or seller operating on the assumption that “the market” is uniformly strong – or uniformly cooling – may be making decisions based on conditions that don’t apply to their specific town.

The semi-annual comparison Slade tracks surfaces some of the year’s most striking figures. Average sale prices in Maplewood rose from $1,073,000 in the first half of 2025 to $1,253,000 in the first half of 2026 – roughly 17%. South Orange moved from $1,064,000 to $1,176,000. Livingston climbed from $1,263,000 to $1,409,000. West Orange posted gains from $705,000 to $765,000.

But price appreciation alone doesn’t tell the full story. The percentage of sales closing above asking price has shifted in ways that complicate the narrative. South Orange posted the largest increase in that metric, moving from 13.7% over asking last year to 14.8% this year. Maplewood’s year-to-date figure stands at 16.9% over asking.

Livingston, however, has seen a sharp reversal. The percentage of sales above asking dropped from 7.3% in the first half of 2025 to just 1.9% in the same period this year – even as average prices rose. Union showed a similar pattern, falling from 5.7% over asking to 3.3%. Slade views this as evidence that buyers in those markets are willing to pay higher absolute prices but less willing to enter bidding wars.

“In a low inventory market, buyers are going to behave that much more aggressively if they truly want – or need – to buy a house,” Slade says. “The stronger the need, the higher they’re willing to go.”

Transaction volume adds another layer. Unit sales are up across all six towns, but the increases are not concentrated in the markets with the highest index readings.

West Orange rose from 161 units in the first half of 2025 to 201 units this year. Union posted an even larger jump – from 103 units to 187 units. These are not the towns with the most intense buyer competition by Slade’s index. They are, however, towns where reduced competitive pressure may have allowed more transactions to close – buyers who might have been outbid in Maplewood or South Orange finding success in adjacent markets.

According to Slade, this pattern reflects how competitive intensity in the highest-index towns redirects buyer activity. When Maplewood and South Orange are running at 1.9 and 1.8 respectively, some buyers get priced out or exhausted by the bidding process and shift their search to markets where they have a better chance of winning.

Slade notes that buyers who have lost multiple offers tend to recalibrate over time. “We usually say they have to lose a few to finally start to take the advice we give them and incorporate it into their decision-making process,” he says. That recalibration – toward more realistic offer strategies or toward different submarkets – may be part of what’s driving volume gains in the lower-index towns.

Slade expects the traditional mid-July through late-August pattern to hold in terms of raw activity: fewer new listings, declining under-contract counts, quieter open houses. What he does not expect is a proportional collapse in the index ratios.

“We usually continue to see fewer listings and declining under-contracts as we progress through July and August, and then we ramp up again in September,” Slade says. “My Hyper Market Index may not necessarily align with the anticipated drop-off, as the ratios may stay in line with one another.”

The distinction matters. If both listings and under-contracts decline at roughly the same rate, the ratio stays stable – meaning competitive conditions persist even as the absolute number of transactions falls. For sellers, a quieter summer does not necessarily mean a weaker market. For buyers, the leverage they might expect from seasonal slowdowns may not materialize in the highest-demand towns.

Slade’s own pipeline reflects this. His team listed three properties in the past week and has three more scheduled over the coming weeks – an unusually active summer slate that he says reflects seller confidence in current conditions.

The Hyper Market Index is a weekly tracking tool developed by Slade and his team to measure buyer-to-seller dynamics across Maplewood, South Orange, West Orange, Livingston, Union, and a sixth tracked town. It informs both pricing strategy for sellers and offer positioning for buyers.

When working with buyers in Maplewood, Slade shares the 16.9% over-asking average directly. “That’s the average,” he tells them. “There are going to be some that are lower, maybe some even higher. But you need to incorporate that into your mindset because that’s how the market is currently trending.”

The index’s utility lies in its granularity. A regional average obscures the difference between a 1.9 in Maplewood and a 0.6 in Livingston. For buyers and sellers making decisions that involve hundreds of thousands of dollars, that gap defines the strategy itself – determining whether to price aggressively to spark a bidding war or to target a realistic number and wait for the right offer.

About Mark Slade Homes: Mark Slade leads Mark Slade Homes, a Keller Williams team with over $500 million in lifetime sales volume across 52 New Jersey municipalities, specializing in the NYC commuter town corridor across Essex, Union, and Morris counties.

Disclosure: Individuals or companies mentioned may have a commercial relationship with KeyCrew.

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