If you are pricing a specific house in Pittsford, Henrietta or Honeoye Falls, you will run into two very different housing reports in the same afternoon. One is the NYSAR county housing report, published monthly by the New York State Association of Realtors, which reports Monroe County as a single unit. The other is the set of Greater Rochester Association of Realtors statistics drawn from local MLS data, which can go down to town and sometimes to school district or price band.

Both can be accurate. Both can point in opposite directions on the same month. That is not a scandal, it is a difference in geography, definitions and sample size.

Here is what this post covers: what each report is built to do, the three definitional traps that make headlines contradict each other, why town-level numbers for smaller towns need special handling, and a short list matching common seller and buyer questions to the report that actually answers them.

One thing up front, because it matters. I am not quoting figures in this post. Monthly numbers go stale within weeks and a number without its geography and reporting month attached is worse than no number at all. When you want current figures for your address, I pull them fresh and tell you which report they came from.

What the NYSAR county report is built for

NYSAR publishes county-level data on a monthly cycle. For Monroe County that typically means closed sales, median sale price, new listings, inventory and months of supply, all labeled with the reporting month.

Its strengths are consistency and authority. The methodology does not change from month to month, so a twelve-month trend line actually means something. If someone asks for a Monroe County median sale price source that will not be quietly redefined next quarter, this is where I start.

Its limitation is obvious once you say it out loud. Monroe County contains the City of Rochester, Pittsford, Greece, Webster, Rush and everything else. A single county median blends all of it. A move-up seller in Brighton is not competing with the county. They are competing with a handful of similar homes within a few miles.

What GRAR and local MLS data do that county data cannot

Greater Rochester Association of Realtors statistics come out of the local MLS, which is the system agents use to list and record sales. That is the raw layer. Because it is the raw layer, it can be cut narrowly: by town, by property type, by price range, by rolling three-month or twelve-month window.

That is what pricing a specific suburban home requires. A four bedroom colonial in West Henrietta and a four bedroom colonial in Mendon are not interchangeable, and no county figure will tell you the difference. Local MLS data will.

The tradeoff is volatility. The narrower the cut, the fewer sales sit behind the number, and the more a single unusual closing moves the median. I will come back to that.

The geography trap

Most of the contradictions I see between reports trace back to one missing label: geography.

• City of Rochester is not Monroe County. Different price levels, different inventory, different pace.
• The Rochester metro area is larger still and can include neighboring counties, so a metro figure will not match a county figure.
• Town lines and school district lines are not the same lines. Addresses on the edges of Pittsford, Brighton and Henrietta are a regular source of confusion, and a report cut by town will not match one cut by district.
• Mailing address is not municipality. A Rochester postal address does not mean the home is in the city.

When a report gives you a number without saying which of those it means, treat the number as unusable until you find out. I have seen listing counts and sales counts pulled from two different geographies and then divided into each other, which produces a figure that looks alarming and means nothing.

Days on market means two different things

This is the single most useful thing to know when two sources disagree.

Some sources report days from list to contract. That is true market exposure: how long the home sat before a buyer committed. Other sources report days from list to close, which bundles in the entire financing and closing period after the contract was signed. In this market that back end commonly runs several weeks on a mortgage deal.

So a home can show a short exposure figure on one site and a much longer figure on another, with neither being wrong. This is also why you sometimes see a strong sale-to-list ratio sitting next to a long days-on-market number in the same table and think the table is broken. Usually it is not broken. It is measuring two different clocks.

Before you draw any conclusion from a days-on-market figure, find the source's own definition page. If you cannot find it, the number is decoration.

How months of supply is actually calculated

Months of supply is simple arithmetic: active listings divided by closed sales per month. It answers one question. At the current sales pace, how long would it take to sell everything currently for sale?

The industry convention treats roughly five to six months as a balanced market, less than that as favoring sellers, more as favoring buyers. That is a rule of thumb, not a law of physics, and it behaves poorly at small sample sizes.

Because it is a ratio, both halves have to come from the same geography and the same period. If the listing count is a lagged or partial snapshot, or if listings come from one area and sales from a wider one, the result can land at an implausible extreme. A very low months of supply figure for Monroe County should make you check the inputs before you make a decision on it. You can test it yourself: multiply the months of supply by the number of active listings, and see whether the implied monthly sales pace is believable for that geography.

Small towns need rolling windows

Mendon, Rush and Honeoye Falls close a modest number of homes in any given month. Pittsford closes more, but still not enough for a single month's median to be stable.

When I look at those towns I use a rolling three-month or twelve-month window and I say so. Two things I do not do: report a one-month town median as if it were a trend, and substitute a Monroe County figure for a town figure because the town figure looks thin. Some measures, months of supply and sale-to-list ratio in particular, are often not published at town level at all, or rest on samples too small to be meaningful.

Which report answers which question

Practical matching:

• Is the market cooling? County-level trend over several months, not one month of one town.
• What should I list at? Local MLS data on comparable homes, plus what those homes actually looked like inside.
• How long until I sell? Days to contract for your town and price band, with the definition confirmed.
• How much competition will I face in spring? New listings and inventory for your town, read against the same month last year.
• Can I buy before I sell? Rate and payment math, then local absorption in the town you are buying into.

Where an aggregator disagrees with NYSAR or GRAR, I lead with NYSAR or GRAR and say where the discrepancy sits. And if a number I need does not exist at the level you need it, I tell you that instead of borrowing a bigger geography and hoping.

If you want the current figures for your street, your price band and your town, with the source and reporting period attached to each one, book a time with me and I will pull them and walk you through how they were built.

Khem Kadariya

About this data

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