Summer Hot Spot: Median Sale Price for Area Homes Up 88 Percent Since 2019

A deep dive into summer real estate stats and trends

Summer has long been the most active season for buying and selling real estate in northern Michigan. So, how was summer 2026?

Northern Express crunched the numbers (provided local real estate association Aspire North) and checked in with local realtors for reaction and analysis.

Almost Everything Is Up

The following numbers are for the five-county region of Antrim, Benzie, Grand Traverse, Kalkaska, and Leelanau counties.

The median residential sales prices (a more accurate figure than average price, which gets skewed by a few super high sales) in June, July, and August of this year were $475,000, $451,687, and $450,000, respectively, up from $432,500, $395,000, and $434,500 in 2025.

The number of sales was 273, 304, and 280 in June, July, and August, compared to 282, 295, and 296 last year.

Total sales volume in June, July, and August of this year was $184.2 million, $208.5 million, and $184.5 million, respectively. That’s up from $155.6 million, $168.3 million, and $168.2 million for the same three months last year.

Though there were county-by-county variations, these numbers are more or less on par with growth from 2024 to 2025.

To put all this in perspective on the very strong growth curve over the past several years, compare the above data to numbers from July 2019: Median sales price was $240,000 and total sales volume was $127.8 million across 406 sales.

If you don’t have your phone calculator handy, that’s an 88 percent increase in median sales price and 33 percent increase in sales volume in just seven years.

Trends and Insights

Inventory (the number of homes available) is finally creeping back up, even if it’s a slight increase. Meagan Luce, broker/owner of Century 21 in Traverse City, was glad to see sales activity move in the right direction this summer and earlier this year.

“Two or three years ago were the lowest number of sales we’ve had in as long as we can remember historically,” she says. “So the number of sales is climbing, which is good.”

You may have noticed that homes for sale seem to be on the market a bit longer than in years past. That’s because while prices continue to climb across the board—median sales price in Grand Traverse County was $490,000 in August of this year and $426,000 in August 2025—time to sell is flat or increasing.

Part of this is buyers being too aggressive with their asking prices, Luce says. There was a time when sellers could name their price (particularly when interest rates were super low during the early 2020s) but that’s no longer the case.

“Overpriced properties are not moving. They just aren’t. Properties that are positioned well and priced correctly, those are the ones that are still selling well,” Luce says. “And the further a seller makes the list price away from actual market value means the longer they’re going to sit on the market, and statistically we can show that in every single county, every single year, the longer a property sits on the market, the less it sells for. So sellers actually undercut their price by overpricing the properties initially.”

Increased inventory also makes for less urgent buyers, Luce says.

“Buyers are feeling like they have more time because the bidding war frenzies are much less common than they had been for so long,” she says. “As inventory is climbing…buyers now have more confidence that they do have more options.”

Still, inventory is far less than a lot of buyers would like it to be. Jonathan Oltersdorf with Oltersdorf Realty in Suttons Bay attributes this in large part to a double “lock-in effect.”

“A lot of the older people that have lived in their houses for decades want to downsize to a cheaper house, but even when buying a cheaper house, their taxes could double or triple, so they’re staying in these larger houses,” he says. “And then you combine that with the fact that a lot of younger existing homeowners have these 3 percent mortgages and can’t afford to move from a starter home to a larger home now because their payment would double or triple [due to higher interest rates].”

Leelanau Is Still King

Despite those roadblocks, nowhere are the prices higher and the market hotter than Leelanau County. Oltersdorf says this summer was exceptional.

“When you look at the numbers, it really blew away the last two summers, actually,” he says. “The average sale price in Leelanau County in June through August was over a million dollars. Last June through August there were 32 sales over a million. This year had 47 sales over a million. That means that basically one third of the sales in the county were over a million dollars.”

Cash sales (buyers who can buy a home without having to finance) still represent a big chunk of transactions, even as prices soar. “We’re seeing 47 percent being cash purchases even with that average sales price,” Oltersdorf adds.

Interesting tidbit: Around 55 percent of Leelanau County’s homes are second homes or vacation properties, a significantly higher percentage than neighboring counties (Grand Traverse is around 15-20 percent, depending on the data source).

That number has been steady for years in Leelanau, Oltersdorf says, and has always served to put a pinch on available inventory. “It’s the most desirable county in the state,” he says.

With these types of properties, certain economic factors can have significant influence on pricing.

“Right now [the stock market] is booming, so these out-of-area buyers are just kind of trading assets,” Oltersdorf says. “They’re selling investments and buying real estate.”

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