This post shows you how to pull two county-level housing charts yourself, for free, from the St. Louis Federal Reserve's FRED database. One tracks the number of active listings in Monroe County. The other tracks median days on market. Both update monthly. Neither costs anything, neither requires a login, and neither is filtered through a lead-generation page.

By the end you will know the exact series IDs, the click path, how to download the raw numbers into a spreadsheet, how to set a year-over-year view, and how to get an email when a new month posts. You will also know what these two charts cannot tell you, which matters just as much.

Why I stopped quoting aggregator pages

Here is what set me off. Two well-known consumer real estate sites published figures for the city of Rochester covering the same month, July 2026. They do not agree.

Days on market differs by a factor of four. One site says sales rose about 79 percent, the other says sales fell. And look at the Houzeo pairing: a sale-to-list ratio of 120.57 percent alongside a median marketing time of 51 days. A market clearing more than 20 percent over asking price does not also take seven weeks to sell. One of those two numbers is an artifact.

There is a second problem. Every figure in that table describes the city of Rochester. If you are analyzing Henrietta, Pittsford, Brighton, Mendon or Honeoye Falls, the city is the wrong geography. For scale: Zillow's ZHVI put the city at $252,192 on a page dated June 30, 2026, and Monroe County at $285,439 as of an April 30, 2026 update. NYSAR data reported by the Rochester Business Journal on June 26, 2026 put the Monroe County median sale price at $308,500 for May 2026, described as another new high. Those are not interchangeable.

So go upstream. Get county-level data with a documented source, a stated reporting period and a download button.

What the two series are

FRED is the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis data portal. It hosts county-level housing metrics sourced from Realtor.com's listing data, republished monthly with consistent methodology and a permanent series ID. The two that matter most for supply analysis in this market:

• ACTLISCOU36055: Housing Inventory, Active Listing Count, Monroe County, NY. The 36055 is the county FIPS code. This is your Rochester inventory data source when you want a raw count rather than someone's spin on a count.
• MEDDAYONMAR36055: Housing Inventory, Median Days on Market, Monroe County, NY. Same geography, same release, same monthly cadence.

A third series is worth adding to your bookmarks: MEDLISPRI36055, median listing price for Monroe County. That series showed $319,900 for May 2026. Note the word listing. It is what sellers ask, not what buyers pay. The NYSAR median sale price for the same month was $308,500. Two different measurements, both useful, easy to confuse.

Pulling FRED Monroe County active listings, step by step

1. Go to fred.stlouisfed.org.
2. Type ACTLISCOU36055 into the search box and press enter. Searching the ID rather than words gets you the exact series with no guessing.
3. Click the series title. You land on a chart page with the current value, the units and the reporting period printed above the graph.
4. Read the Notes panel below the chart before you read the chart. It names the source, defines the metric and states the frequency. Whether the series is seasonally adjusted is stated there too. This matters in a market with a real spring listing season.
5. Set the date range. The default view is usually the full history. Use the range buttons or type start and end dates to isolate, say, the last three years.
6. Click Edit Graph, then under Units choose Percent Change from Year Ago. Now you are looking at year-over-year change instead of a raw line, which strips out the seasonal shape and shows direction.
7. Click Download and choose CSV or Excel. You get every observation with its date. This is the file you actually work from.
8. Click Add Line inside Edit Graph if you want a comparison county. Search by name, for example active listing count plus the county you care about, rather than guessing at FIPS codes.

Two extras that are worth the ninety seconds. Create a free FRED account and click Notify Me on the series page, and you get an email the moment a new month posts, so you stop refreshing aggregator pages. And use the Share or link tool to save a permanent URL of your customized chart, date range and transformation included, so your notes stay reproducible six months later.

Pulling median days on market Monroe County

Same click path with MEDDAYONMAR36055. The habit I would build is charting the two together. Rising active listings with flat days on market means new supply is being absorbed. Rising active listings with rising days on market is the real signal that pricing power is shifting. Falling listings with falling days is a supply squeeze, and that is closer to what the county evidence has been pointing at: values up about 4.1 percent year over year per Zillow's April 30, 2026 county update, with a record county median sale price in May 2026.

Know the lag before you trust the line

Here is the part most people skip. These series are not real time, and the lag is not uniform.

When I last worked these pages, the ACTLISCOU36055 page was dated February 6, 2026 with observations running only through January 2026. The median days on market series ran only through April 2026. That is normal for county-level housing inventory data, and it means the newest month you can see may be several months behind the market you are standing in.

So the discipline is simple. Always write down two dates: the last observation date, and the date you pulled it. If your spreadsheet says "Monroe County active listings, last observation January 2026, accessed August 2026," nobody, including you, mistakes it for this week's condition.

For something genuinely current, pair the FRED charts with the Freddie Mac Primary Mortgage Market Survey, also free and published weekly. For the week ending August 13, 2026, the 30-year fixed came in at 6.67 percent, down from 6.69 percent the prior week and 6.58 percent a year earlier. The 15-year was 5.96 percent. Trading Economics noted the 6.67 percent reading ended five consecutive weekly increases. Rates are effectively flat year over year while county prices have moved. That is a cleaner story than any "cooling market" headline.

What these charts will not do for you

• No town-level detail. There is no free FRED series for Henrietta, West Henrietta, Pittsford, Brighton, Mendon, Rush or Honeoye Falls. The county is the smallest geography available in this release, and the county blends the city with every suburb in it. Homes in Pittsford, Brighton, Mendon and Honeoye Falls have generally transacted above the county median, so a county line will understate them.
• Listings, not closings. Active listing count and median days on market describe supply behavior. They are not closed-sale prices. For sold data, the association releases through NYSAR and the Rochester Business Journal are the primary path, most recently $308,500 for Monroe County in May 2026.
• Not the same DOM your agent quotes. Read the series notes. A listing-platform definition of days on market and an MLS definition can diverge, especially with relisting activity.
• Forecasts are not results. Realtor.com's December 19, 2025 outlook ranked Rochester the number two U.S. housing market for 2026, projecting 5.3 percent sales growth and a 10.3 percent median sale price increase on a median list price of $256,900, against a national median around $415,000, with new construction at only 6.8 percent of listings. That was a forecast published in December 2025. Label it that way every time you use it, and check it against the actual monthly series.

Build the two-minute monthly routine

Bookmark the three FRED series. Turn on email notifications. Once a month, download the CSVs, append the new row, and log the observation date next to the access date. Add the weekly Freddie Mac rate. That gives you a primary-source picture of county supply, marketing time, asking prices and financing cost, assembled entirely from housing data for free.

Then do the part a chart cannot. Getting from a county line to a defensible number on a specific street in West Henrietta or Honeoye Falls means comparable sales, condition adjustments and knowing which of those comps had a wet basement or a roof at year twenty-two. I came into this business wholesaling and flipping before I got licensed, so I read the spreadsheet and then go walk the house.

If you want a second set of eyes on your numbers, or a comparable-sales analysis for a property or portfolio in south and southeast Monroe County, book a time with me here. Bring your spreadsheet. I will tell you where I think it is wrong.

Khem Kadariya

About this data

The figures in this post were compiled from publicly available sources including Houzeo, Movoto, Redfin, RochesterFirst and Zillow, 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.