Should I buy a house now or wait a year in Rochester NY?

This post does three things. It shows you the most recent verifiable price change in the Rochester market and what that change would cost you if it repeated for another twelve months. It explains why rent and price growth work against a buyer in different ways. And it tells you plainly which numbers I am not going to quote, because I could not confirm them from a source I trust.

I sell houses in Henrietta, West Henrietta, Pittsford, Brighton, Mendon, Rush and Honeoye Falls. Buyers ask me some version of the same question every week: should I buy now or wait until next year. Here is the honest arithmetic.

What does a year of waiting actually cost in Monroe County?

Using the last full-quarter figure I can source, a year of waiting costs roughly $18,200 on a median-priced home. That is 7.2 percent of $252,800, which was the Rochester metro median sales price in the first quarter of 2026 according to National Association of Realtors quarterly data reported by the Rochester Business Journal on May 7, 2026. That 7.2 percent year-over-year gain was the tenth largest among the 235 largest US markets.

Two caveats on that number, because they matter.

• It is a metro figure, not a Monroe County figure, and not a town figure. Pittsford and Rush do not move in lockstep with the metro average.
• It is backward looking. It tells you what happened through March 2026. It is not a forecast, and I am not making one.

The $18,200 is what the same house costs later. It is not the whole cost of waiting. Add twelve more months of rent, which you do not get back, and the gap between buying now and buying next year gets wider than the price change alone suggests.

Which Rochester numbers can you actually trust?

Fewer than you would hope. Aggregator sites publish figures that contradict each other for the same market in the same quarter, and some of them carry a fresh date stamp on stale data. Here is what I am willing to stand behind, with the reporting period attached to each figure.

Read that table carefully and you will notice the quarters do not march upward in a straight line. Q1 2026 at $252,800 is well below Q3 2025 at $287,300. That is seasonality, not a crash. First quarter is normally the weakest quarter for prices in this market, which is exactly why a 7.2 percent year-over-year gain in Q1 is worth paying attention to.

Notice too that the Monroe County figure of $319,900 is a listing price, meaning what sellers asked in May 2026. It is not what buyers paid. Comparing an asking price to a sale price is the single most common way people talk themselves into the wrong conclusion about this market.

What about mortgage rates? Should I wait for them to drop?

I am not going to hand you a rate forecast, and I am not going to quote you a current rate in a blog post that you might read three months from now. Rates move weekly. Any figure I print here goes stale fast, and a mortgage rate forecast for Rochester NY is worth exactly as much as every other rate forecast made in the last four years, which is to say not much.

What I can tell you is how the two variables interact, because that part is not a prediction.

• Price is permanent. Rate is not. You sign one purchase price for the life of that house. You can refinance a rate. You cannot refinance a purchase price.
• A rate drop brings competition with it. Every buyer sitting out this year is watching the same rate. When it moves, they move together, into the same limited pool of listings.
• A modest rate improvement can be erased by price growth. If the house costs $18,200 more, a slightly better rate on a bigger loan may leave your payment roughly where it started, with a larger down payment required to get there.

That is the actual trade. Not rates versus prices as separate bets, but both at once.

The rent side of the ledger

I do not have a verified median rent figure for Monroe County, so I am not going to invent one. What I do have is the Census Bureau data reported by the Rochester Beacon on July 9, 2026: 50.9 percent of Rochester renters were cost-burdened in 2024, compared with 24.7 percent of homeowners. Both figures improved from 2015, when they stood at 57.9 percent and 25.8 percent, but the renter share still represents more than 38,000 households.

Cost-burdened means paying more than 30 percent of income on housing. Roughly half of renters in the city were in that position, against roughly a quarter of owners. Whatever you pay in rent over the next twelve months does not build equity and does not come back at closing.

For long-term context from the same source: the City of Rochester median sale price went from about $102,000 in 2018 to $148,000 in 2024, a 45 percent increase, before reaching $181,000 at the close of Q2 2026.

Is the market cooling at all?

Statewide, slightly. Redfin reported a New York median sale price of $553,268 in June 2026, up 7.4 percent year over year, with homes sold down 3.5 percent to 10,253, homes for sale up 2.7 percent, and median days on market at 36, one day longer than the prior year. That is a mild loosening in volume and inventory, with prices still rising.

Locally, listing counts in the smaller southeast towns remain thin. On August 27, 2026, Rush had four houses listed for sale, priced from $399,900 to $1,298,000. Four. In a town that small, one unusual sale swings the median by tens of thousands of dollars, which is why you will see a Rush price statistic quoted as down 25 percent on one site and up on another in the same week. Treat town-level medians in Rush, Mendon and Honeoye Falls as directional at best.

When waiting is the right call

Sometimes it is. I have told buyers to wait, and I will do it again. Wait if:

• Your down payment is not yet in the account and pulling it together would leave you with no reserves for a roof, a furnace or a sump pump failure.
• Your credit score is close to a threshold and ninety days of work would move you into a better pricing tier.
• Your income changed recently and an underwriter would want more history.
• You are not sure you are staying in the area for at least a few years. Transaction costs on both ends need time to absorb.

None of those are market timing. They are readiness. Monroe County home buying timing should follow your finances, not a forecast.

Common questions

How much did Rochester home prices go up in the last year?

The Rochester metro median sales price was $252,800 in the first quarter of 2026, up 7.2 percent from the same quarter a year earlier, per NAR data reported by the Rochester Business Journal in May 2026. That ranked tenth largest among the 235 largest US markets. Later 2026 quarterly figures were not available at the time of writing.

Will Rochester home prices go down in 2026 or 2027?

I do not know, and neither does anyone quoting you a precise number. The most recent verified data points up, not down: 7.2 percent year-over-year growth in the metro in Q1 2026, and 7.4 percent statewide in June 2026 per Redfin. A forecast for Rochester home price appreciation in 2026 is an opinion. The quarterly data is a fact, and it is what I plan around.

Why do different websites show completely different Rochester prices?

Because they are measuring different things and refreshing on different schedules. One site publishes asking prices, another publishes closed sales, a third publishes a valuation index of all homes whether they sold or not. Some pages also carry a current date on data that is months old. Always check whether a figure is a list price or a sale price, and which month it covers.

Does it make sense to buy in a town like Rush or Mendon with so few listings?

It can, but the process looks different. With a handful of active listings at any moment, you may wait weeks for something to come on, then need to move within days. Get fully underwritten before you start looking, and be ready to expand your search into West Henrietta, Honeoye Falls or the Rush-Henrietta corridor rather than holding out for one street.

What is the fastest way to find out what waiting would cost me specifically?

Run your own numbers rather than the median. Take the price range you are shopping, apply the growth rate you consider realistic, add twelve months of your current rent, and compare that against what you would gain by waiting, such as a larger down payment or a better credit tier. The answer is different for every buyer, and it is usually clear once it is written down.

If you want help putting those numbers on paper for your situation, in your price range, in the towns you are actually looking at, book a time with me. No pressure to list or buy. Bring your questions and I will show you the same data I use.

Khem Kadariya, Sold By Khem

About this data

The figures in this post were compiled from publicly available sources including Zillow, Houzeo, Movoto, RochesterFirst and Redfin, along with other public market data. Real estate numbers change quickly, and these were accurate as of August 2026. For current figures on a specific home, street, or town, ask me directly rather than relying on a published average.