The Greenwich Real Estate Records in 2025

Sales in Greenwich finished the year strong even with very little to buy. Fourth quarter sales were up 9.6% over the Q4 2024 or from 115 sales in 2024 to 126 sales last year. Now an almost 10% jump in sales is not bad, but we are only talking 11 more sales. What is remarkable about that 10% increase is when sales are up 10%, while year-end inventory is down 32%. High stock prices and uncertainty gave buyers the funding they needed while uncertainty about the 2026 economy gave many buyers the motivation to get out there and buy now.

Inventory continues sharp drop

We started 2026 with only 57 listings, the lowest number ever in Greenwich real estate history going back to June 1864, when we only had 47 listings during the Civil War. (I made that second part up, but my brother, Russ, has hard numbers going back to 1976.) Prior to Covid, the lowest number of listings that we ever had was 214 single family home listings in the last century. With only 1.3 months of supply, we could have zero listing by the end of February.

This actually won’t happen as we will get more new inventory in January and February. However, if this cold, snowy, windy winter continues we will see less new listing than we might expect in a milder winter. The other reason we won’t go to zero listing is over-priced houses. Of our 58 listing, almost half have been on the market for more than 4 months. Half of that half have not had a price reduction in 4 months and those will likely still be on the market, when we starting getting lots of new inventory in March. We won’t see zero listing, but inventory could drop some more as more competitively, and more recently listed houses do sell.

In 2026, the Greenwich market will still be all about inventory. In 2019, we started the year with 454 listings or 8 times the number of listings than we have now. Even if inventory doubles or triples, we will still have a seller’s market.

In another amazing record, we actually had more contracts at 58 than we had inventory at 57 listings. Obviously, that can’t continue for long. If we don’t have more inventory, we will have lower sales and that’s what we saw this year under $2 million. In 2024, we sold 159 houses under $2 million. This year we only sold 137 houses sell for less than $2 million or a drop of 14%. Under $1 million, we saw a 37% drop in sales from 30 sales in 2024 to only 19 sales in 2025 or a 37% drop.

Whither the mortgage contingency in 2025?

On the buyer’s side, the mortgage contingency has almost disappeared. Last century, around two thirds of deals had a mortgage contingency. In 2025, of our 58 contracts that we have only 7 are contingent contracts. Of the 51 pending contracts, 14 had had a contingency, but these days those contingencies are just as likely to be a contingency having to do with a title issue or a land use issue rather than a financing contingency.

We are even seeing a return to the 1980s, where most contracts had two contingencies, a week or 10-day contingency for an inspection and a 45-day contingency for mortgage approval. The bottom line is that of those 58 contracts only a third or less probably had a mortgage contingency. Now, this doesn’t mean that those “all cash” buyers weren’t getting a mortgage. Many buyers have gotten underwritten pre-approved, with the bank fully reviewing all that stuff banks review. With all the work done for a loan approval, except for the appraisal, these buyers were willing to put their 10% downpayment at risk and forego the mortgage contingency.

Lack of affordability changing Greenwich

People worry about affordability and their ability for their children to live where they grew up or whether local business employees, fire or police can live here so they are already local when an emergency occurs. Greenwich is changing and we are seeing less socio-economic diversity. We need to have housing that is affordable if we want to maintain the diversity, that makes Greenwich so attractive and an interesting place to live for so many.

Private Sales

It is not as bad as it seems, as many of our more affordable houses are sold privately. This saves the homeowner much of the cost and hassle of preparing their house for a public sale. If you have a decent house for under $1 million, you can probably get multiple offers with private marketing. At the same time, if you want to make sure that you are getting the highest price for your house, then fixing it up and staging it is important. We had a client spend over $30,000 on fixing up the house and it got them an extra quarter of a million dollars.

Condos and co-ops

Also, we have condo and multi-family alternatives. That market is smaller, but we have more months of supply there.

2025 sales, inventory, and volume numbers

In actual numbers, we ended the year with 519 sales reported on the GMLS, exceeding last year’s sales of 501 houses sold. (Then a 2025 sale got reported late and GMLS sales now say we had a 520 sales, for the nitpickers.) While our inventory hit that all-time record low of only 58 single family homes, we have the same number of contracts waiting to close. Even if we don’t get a lot of quick sales from new inventory in this month, January will still be a good month for sales as many of those 58 contracts will close this month.

The converse of low inventory leading to lower sales under $2 million was our over $4 million market. Sales were up over $4 million, with sales over $10 million showing the biggest jump Where we had inventory, we saw an increase in sales. Once again and inventory was actually down over $4 million, but it was from a much higher level, meaning even after the drop in inventory, we still had listings to sell. Above $4 million, sales were up by 46 sales.

What was really up was our total sales volume in 2024, we sold $1.79 billion of single-family homes on the GMLS. Last year in 2025, we sold $2.42 billion in homes sales. This was an increase of 35% in total sales volume, while the number of sales only went up 3.8%. This is the kind of numbers that makes the Town Treasurer smile. The state portion of the sales conveyance taxes receipts are up even more than 35%. Starting in July 2020, the Connecticut Legislature enacted a 1% surcharge on sales over $2.5 million.

Getting back your conveyance tax surcharge

So, in Greenwich, two-thirds of our sellers pay this surcharge to the state. However, if you move within Connecticut, or even better within Greenwich, and stay for 6 years you get the surcharge back over 3 year. If you bought your house since 2020, talk to your accountant about whether you should be getting a rebate or call me for the details, which can be tricky.

How much has your house appreciated in 2025

The heart of our market continues to be the $1 – 2 million where we had 118 sales or 23% of our sales. With median prices climbing, we saw 109 sales from $2 – 3 million, almost as much as we saw from $1 - 2 million.

We had record sales over $10 million, and this pushed our average sales price from $3.58 million in 2024 to $4.32 million in 2025 or an increase of 21% last year which is huge. However, you should always be careful about average appreciation, particularly in Greenwich in 2025. We have always had a sales price curve with a long tail as you go higher and this year it was a very long tail.

While that 21% average sales price increase is mathematically correct, if you are looking to get a guesstimate of how much your house went up, you are much better off looking at the median rather than the average. Our 2024 median was $2.87 million and in 2025 our median sales price had risen to $3.15 million or a 9.9% increase. That’s a very nice appreciation, but is it a good estimate of appreciation? Medians are also affected by skewed distributions, just not as much.

When you also look at the median appreciation per square foot, the median sales price appreciation might be a good estimate. In 2024, houses sold for a median sale price of $762/sf. Last year, the sales price/sf was up to $835/sf or a 9.6% appreciation, just slightly below the sales price appreciation of 9.9%. An appreciation of almost 10% when other areas of the U.S. are seeing price actually decline is still huge, and it’s less deceptive. Your particular house’s numbers will vary.

Months of supply even lower

With only 58 listings, months of supply for the whole market is 1.3 months down from a very low 2.1 months of supply at the end of 2024. We do have one anomalous price range due to the law of small numbers. We actually have more months of supply from $600 – 800K months than we do over $10 million, but that can’t right as that price range is hot. What caused us to see  4.8 months of supply in this price range were 2 new listings and only 5 sales all year. Whenever there are only a few of anything, whether sales, inventory or contracts, adding only a couple more will make a big differences in any stats that require division. So, 2 listings divided by 5 sales times 12 months equals 4.8 months of supply. If we only had 1 listing the MoS would be cut in half to 2.4 months of supply all because of one listing.

For a real number that is really incredible, over $6.5 million we only have 3.6 months of supply. It was not that long ago that the months of supply in that price range was measured in years, not a few months.

This year promises to be a very interesting one, particularly for buyers in the first quarter. You need to be flexible, ready to move quickly and have a well-connected, experienced attorney.

Mark Pruner is a senior sales executive with Compass Connecticut and a founding member of the Greenwich Streets Team at Compass. He can be reached at 203-817-2871 or [email protected].