You tour a house in May. It doesn't sell. In July it turns up again in your saved search: same kitchen, same photos, a slightly different number on the sign, and a "just listed" badge with the days-on-market counter sitting at zero.
That reset is not a glitch. It is a documented pattern in how Ann Arbor listings behave right now. Some sellers walk away entirely: the share of area listings that expire without selling and never come back has climbed from 6 percent in 2023 to 17 percent over the past year, and those withdrawn homes typically sat a median 71 days, more than a third of them after already cutting the price once. Other sellers take a different route. When a listing stalls, it can be cancelled and re-entered as a brand new one, and every portal treats it exactly like fresh inventory. The arrival date resets. The days-on-market clock returns to zero. It lands in your inbox looking like something that just hit the market this morning.
If you are comparing houses by how long they've supposedly been sitting, you may be reading a seller's second or third attempt at a price, not the market's actual verdict on the house.
That same blind spot, mistaking one number for the whole picture, shows up again the moment you zoom out from a single listing to an entire neighborhood.
Why Downtown, Kerrytown, and Burns Park Can't Agree on What's Happening
Ann Arbor's citywide median sale price, over the three months ending June 2026, was $475,000, up 3.0 percent from the same period a year earlier. Homes were selling in about 36 days and drawing roughly two offers apiece. That is a calm, unremarkable number.
It is also not what any specific neighborhood was actually doing at the same time.
| Area | Reporting window | Median sale price | Year-over-year change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ann Arbor, citywide | 3 months ending June 2026 | $475,000 | +3.0% |
| Downtown Ann Arbor | 3 months ending May 2026 | $699,000 | +77.0% |
| Lower Burns Park | 3 months ending May 2026 | $581,000 | -3.9% |
Two neighborhoods, both inside the same city, both reporting on nearly the same stretch of 2026, and neither tells the story the citywide figure tells. Downtown looks like it repriced overnight. Lower Burns Park, barely a mile away, looks like it cooled.
The explanation is not that buyers suddenly decided downtown was worth 77 percent more. It's that downtown only had about 21 home sales in the reporting month. When your entire sample is 21 transactions, a couple of expensive closings can swing the median by double digits without a single existing owner seeing that kind of gain on their own house.
Look at what actually closed downtown in the first quarter of 2026. In the same three-month stretch, a condo at 111 S. Ashley sold for $490,000 after 11 days on the market. A unit at 410 N. 1st Street, originally listed at $1,359,000 and trimmed to $1,329,000, sold for $1,250,000 after 38 days. A property at 546 N. Main Street sold at full asking, $1,750,000, in zero days, off-MLS with no public exposure at all. And in one new-construction building, three units closed at $1,016,049, $1,047,760, and $2,408,292. Nine properties closed downtown that quarter in total. Whichever mix of those nine happens to close in any given month decides whether the "downtown median" reads like a starter condo market or a penthouse market. Neither read is wrong. They are both true, in different months, depending on what happened to sell.
New construction is adding more of this high end supply into these same small samples. Kerrytown has a 15-unit building under construction at 330 Detroit Street, inside the neighborhood's Flatiron building, with units priced between $1,345,000 and $1,695,000, plus a separate redevelopment at 303 Detroit Street. Downtown has The Gallery and the 8-unit 212 Miller Ave building, along with The J. Sinclair. The north side has Toll Brothers' North Oaks, priced from $680,000 to $900,000, and the net-zero Veridian at County Farm, spanning studios to townhomes from $300,000 to $990,000. As these buildings close units, usually priced well above the century-old bungalows and Craftsman houses around them, they land in the exact same monthly sample as those resales, and the blended number can lurch without any existing home actually trading for more.
The instability shows up in the data itself, not just between neighborhoods. Look at North Burns Park. One tracker's February 2026 snapshot put the median there at $1.1 million, up 39.8 percent year over year. A separate tracker's trailing twelve-month figure for that same pocket of the city puts the median at $907,500, down 14 percent from the twelve months before that. Same streets, opposite conclusions. That is not an error on either side. It's what happens when the entire monthly dataset for a neighborhood can be a handful of houses, and two measurements simply catch different houses in different windows.
Kerrytown moves just as fast. A February 2026 read put its median at $925,000, up 60.9 percent year over year. By April, a separate snapshot had the median at $1,095,000, nearly $170,000 higher two months later. None of these numbers is wrong. Each is an accurate description of whatever happened to close in that particular window. None of them describes what a typical existing home in the neighborhood is worth, because the sample is too thin to average out the noise.
A neighborhood median is not a price on a house. It's an average of whatever happened to close that month.
What the Zip Codes Show Once You Widen the Lens
Group the same sales by zip code across the broader Ann Arbor Public Schools attendance area, using MLS records pulled in early August 2026 covering 7,810 sales back to January 2023, and a steadier picture appears.
The 48103 zip, covering west Ann Arbor and Scio Township, is the fastest and firmest corner of the market: a median 9 days to sell, at 100 percent of asking. The 48105 zip, north and northeast, is the slowest, with the most inventory and a median 21 days. The 48104 zip commands the highest price per square foot in the district at $386. The 48108 zip remains the most accessible, with a $322,500 median. And the single tightest price band in the entire district isn't the cheapest or the priciest, it's the $750,000 to $1 million range: just 2.3 months of supply, closing at 100.3 percent of asking, in a median 9 days.
Zoom out further and the three-year trend is steady in a way no single month's neighborhood swing is. Price per square foot across the attendance area climbed from $273 to $313 over three years, a 15 percent gain, even as the share of homes selling above asking fell from 60 percent in 2023 to 30 percent this July. Both things are happening at once: values keep rising, but the bidding-war behavior has cooled. Buyers are showing up informed and negotiating rather than bidding blind. Sales volume barely moved across those same three Julys, holding between 159 and 170 closings each year, so this isn't fewer buyers. It's the same number of buyers, negotiating harder.
One more asymmetry worth knowing if you're weighing a condo against a house: condo sellers cut their asking price far more often, 34 percent of closed sales, against 24 percent for houses. A discount on a condo may say more about the asset class than about that particular unit.
What This Means If You're Comparing Neighborhoods
- Compare price per square foot within a zip code or school attendance area rather than trusting a single neighborhood's headline median, which may be built on 20 or 30 sales.
- Treat a "just listed" badge and a zero-day counter with some skepticism, especially if the price looks soft for the street. Ask your agent to pull the full listing history, not just the current public clock.
- Pay attention to the price band you're actually shopping in. The $750,000 to $1 million range is the tightest in the district right now, well above the pace of the citywide average.
- If you're choosing between a condo and a house at similar price points, expect the condo to see a price cut more often, and factor that into how firm you hold your own offer.
A Few Questions Worth Asking Directly
Does a 77 percent jump in Downtown Ann Arbor's median mean the neighborhood got that much more expensive? Not on its own. With roughly 21 sales in the reporting month, a couple of new-construction closings priced well into seven figures can move that median without any existing condo owner seeing gains anywhere close to that.
How do I find out if a "new" listing has actually been on the market before? Ask your agent for the full listing history rather than relying on the public days-on-market count. A cancel-and-relist resets the number the portal shows you, not the house's actual time on the market.
Which part of Ann Arbor is genuinely the most competitive right now? By the numbers, it's the $750,000 to $1 million price band and the 48103 zip code on the west side, both closing near full asking in about nine days, well ahead of the citywide average of 36.
If you're weighing neighborhoods against each other and want someone to pull the actual sales behind a number before you make an offer, Kamran Boushehri works across Ann Arbor and the surrounding Washtenaw County market and can walk through what a specific price band or zip code is really doing before you commit to one. Schedule a consultation to get a clearer read on the block you're actually considering.
