Housing Stability in Central PA: What the Data Actually Shows
There is a piece of received wisdom in real estate that goes like this: inventory is low, therefore competition is high, therefore prices are rising. It is repeated constantly, it sounds like common sense, and in our market right now it is not true.
Low inventory, flat prices
Columbia County inventory is less than half what it was before 2019, down from about 204 homes for sale at any given time to about 88. By the received wisdom, prices should be climbing hard.
They are not. Between April and June 2026, 114 homes sold at a median price of $250,000. In the same quarter a year earlier, 111 homes sold at a median of $252,500. That is a one percent move on a sample of more than a hundred sales in each period. It is flat. (Source: FlexMLS, Columbia County, residential closed sales, April 1 through June 30, 2026.)
The median home sold for exactly 100 percent of its asking price, and half of everything went under contract within 12 days. That is a market clearing efficiently at the prices sellers are asking. It is not a bidding frenzy, and it is not a decline.
Stability is a finding, not a non-event
We will keep saying this in the months when nothing moves. A market that is stable is not a market that is stalling, and telling you plainly that nothing changed is more useful than inventing movement in order to have something to say.
If we only published in the months when the numbers made a dramatic story, you would have no way of knowing whether to believe us in the months when they did.
Why low inventory has not pushed prices up
Sales are down and prices are steady, which sounds contradictory until you look at what is missing. Fewer homes are selling because there are fewer homes to sell. Buyers did not leave. The houses did.
A shortage constrains how much trades. It does not automatically bid up what does trade, particularly in a market where affordability is the reason many buyers are here in the first place. Buyers in this price range do not have unlimited room to stretch, and the data shows they do not stretch.
The part that does move the number
Of those 114 Columbia County sales, 60 went under contract within two weeks, at a median of five days, and not one of them cut its price. Twenty five sat for ninety days or longer. Nineteen of those twenty five cut, they waited a median of 139 days, and they closed at about 90 percent of what they first asked. (Source: FlexMLS.)
Those slow homes closed at 96.3 percent of their final asking price, which looks almost healthy and is the number a listing portal would report, because a portal measures against the most recent price rather than the first one. Against what the seller actually asked on day one, they closed at 90.5 percent.
The price cut hides the damage. In a flat market, the launch price is doing nearly all of the work, and it is the one variable a seller fully controls.
