October 2026 Greenwich Real Estate Market Report

Flat Sales are Good Sales  |  Second Best Year Ever Over $10M  |  Sales Fall Under $4M

For the third month in a row, we have had about 38 sales making for a flat sales line. Now, this is unusual, as our sales are bumpy, going up or down from month to month. What’s it mean? Probably that the market is getting a little better as we get more inventory. Our October 2026 sales exceeded both October 2024 and 2025. In fact, you have to go back to the record-breaking year of 2021 to have higher sales in October.

What is causing sales to be flat? Surprisingly, more inventory is holding up sales. Inventory shot up in September and continued increasing in October. Contracts started rising in October as we had more new inventory to sell.

Normally, at least for the 10 years prior to Covid, sales peaked in June or July and then fell steadily through November. We usually ended the year with a bump up in sales in December as people wanted to get deals done before year-end. (We see the same thing in January, but to a lesser degree. Sellers, if they have a good capital gain, often want to push the sale out until January, so they won’t pay capital gains tax for 15 months.)

This is not what happened the last two years and has a good chance of not happening this year. Our inventory continued to climb in October, when normally it shrinks. What we saw was a few more people listing in October than normal. This gives buyers more options, and the number of contracts continues to rise as these new listings get snapped up. Having said that, our 2026 fall sales are still below the last two years’ sales.

Contracts are likely to continue to increase, and if we get enough new inventory, our contracts may even exceed 2025 contracts. The other big factor that could increase contracts (and a month or two later increase sales) is the election. Normally, mid-term elections are not a major factor, but pre-election there was a lot of uncertainty. This uncertainty was well placed in that practically no one was expecting such a large pick up by the Democrats.

Once the uncertainty is removed, bottled up deals move forward. The Dow certainly took a big jump after the election and then a big dip. If the Dow stays up, so will our market. Part of this is the wealth effect, as people who are richer on paper are more likely to pull the trigger on major purchases.

A bigger factor than the wealth effect here in Greenwich is real cash in hand in the form of bonuses. Bonuses used to be easier to figure out, as they were paid in cash in a lump sum. Post Great Recession, many firms, particularly the publicly traded firms, are awarding bonuses in stock that vest over three years or more. The nice thing is that anyone who has been getting bonuses for more than three years is getting a “full” bonus. It is just composed of three thirds of varying sizes.

When you look at the actual numbers, 2026 is looking a lot like 2025 as we get further into the year. As of the beginning of November, we have the exact same number of listings that we had in 2025 or 115 single family home listings. The distribution also had a high degree of identicalness (which actually is a word, who knew). Only over $10 million is inventory noticeably higher, with 28 listings this year compared to 22 ultra-high-end listings last year.

Inventory is back, but contracts are down 17%, mostly due to poor inventory in August when we had only 75 listings. If we keep getting inventory, our contracts will continue to rise.

In October 2026, our median days on market was a very small 21 days for contracts signed in October. This was up a little from our YTD DOM of 19 days on market; then again, remember that election uncertainty. November contracts will be a good indicator of how tight our market will continue to be.

If you want to see another way to see just how tight the market is. We are in a super-seller’s market all the way up to $10M with less than 3 months of supply. Overall, we only have 2.5 months of supply. We have no inventory under $800K and only 3 sales YTD under that price.

Over $10 million, those 6 additional listings pushed our months of supply up to 9.7 months of supply from 6.4 months of supply in October 2025. More inventory and fewer sales equal a big jump in MoS, so the market must be hurting; well, not really. Last year was the all-time record for sales over $10 million. It doubled the previous record of 19 sales over $10 million set in 2007.

This year so far, we have 26 sales and 6 contracts, meaning this year will be the second-best year ever for ultra-high-end sales. If you simply go back to 2024 sales, you can see just how dramatic our high-end 2026 sales are. In October 2024, we only had 14 sales over $10 million compared to this year’s 26 sales. We also had 30 listings and 21.4 months of supply in 2024.

Traditionally, high-end houses were taken off the market for the winter, but this is an El Niño year, which means we’ll likely be warmer with less snow. This October, we had 3 sales over $10M, and 3 more went to contract that month. The second-best year ever; it's a good time to consider listing a high-end house or to consider a private listing to test the market.

For the rest of the market, sales are doing well with good sales, given our inventory, for all price ranges over $2 million. Under $2M, we are supply constrained, or we’d have a lot more sales.

The idea that with the holiday season coming up, you might as well wait until March to list, may not be as obvious as it has been in prior years.

Stay tuned: El Niño, big bonus pools, a Democratic controlled Congress, and strong buyer interest are going to make the last two months of the year more interesting than normal, as normal is tough to find these days.

Mark Pruner is a founder of the GreenwichStreets Team at Compass. He can be reached at 203-817-2871 or [email protected].