If you underwrite deals in Rochester and the surrounding towns, you have probably pulled a price per square foot number off a website and used it to sanity check an offer. This post explains why that habit blows up, using two real published figures from two real geographies. You will learn where price per square foot actually works, where it lies to you, which data sources contradicted each other this year, and what I check instead before I tell an investor a number is fundable.

I bought and flipped houses before I got licensed. I have stood in the basements. The spread between what a spreadsheet says and what a house is worth is usually a physical thing you can see with your own eyes.

The two numbers, and why they are not comparable

Here is the raw data, each figure with its reporting period.

Look at the gap. A city neighborhood transacting at $114 a square foot and a county median sale price of $308,500 are not two views of one market. They are two different markets that happen to share a mailing address prefix.

Now do the arithmetic that gets people in trouble. Take $114 per square foot, apply it to an 1,800 square foot colonial in Pittsford or Brighton, and you get roughly $205,000. That is nowhere near the Monroe County median sale price of $308,500 from May 2026, and Pittsford, Brighton, Mendon and Honeoye Falls all sit above that county median rather than near the city figure. Run the same logic backwards, price a small city two story off a suburban per foot figure, and you overpay by a margin that no rehab budget survives.

What price per square foot is actually measuring

Price per square foot is a ratio. It carries every assumption baked into the two numbers that produced it, and both of those numbers are softer than they look.

• The square footage itself is disputed. Above grade finished area, county assessor records and listing sheets frequently disagree on the same house. Finished basements get counted in some datasets and not others. A knee wall attic gets counted by whoever wants the bigger number.
• It ignores land. A half acre in Mendon and a 40 by 100 city lot contribute very differently to value, and neither shows up in a per foot calculation.
• It ignores condition, which is the whole flip thesis. Two houses of identical size, one with knob and tube wiring and a failing rear roof plane, one renovated three years ago, produce the same per foot figure and wildly different exit prices.
• Smaller houses carry higher per foot numbers. Kitchens, baths, mechanicals and roofs cost roughly what they cost regardless of house size. Spread those fixed costs over 1,100 square feet and your per foot number climbs. That is math, not appreciation.
• It hides the mix. Northwest Rochester's $114 per square foot was up 22.6% over the trailing three months ending May 2026 while the neighborhood's median sale price rose only 4.3% in the same window. When those two move that differently, something changed about which houses sold, not just what houses are worth.

That last point deserves a second read. Same source, same period, same neighborhood, two growth rates that differ by roughly 18 points. Price per square foot rising five times faster than median price is a composition signal. Redfin also reported that neighborhood's average house price at $183,000 last month, up 25.8%, with roughly 11 days to sell and a competitiveness score of 92 out of 100. A tight, fast market with a shifting mix of sold product is exactly where per foot ratios get least reliable.

Bad housing data sources: the July 2026 example

Two aggregators published July 2026 figures for the city of Rochester. They do not agree, and not by a little.

Same month. Same named geography. Sales up 79% in one, down in the other. Days on market differing by a factor of four. And one page reporting a market clearing 120.57% of asking price while also taking 51 days to sell, which is internally incoherent. A market bidding more than 20% over ask does not need seven weeks of marketing time. Treat that 120.57% as an artifact, not a market fact.

Worth knowing who wrote what you are reading. The Houzeo page carries a byline for a broker based in Bayside, Queens, described as covering upstate markets including Rochester, and the page is labeled as carrying an AI powered forecast. That is not a Rochester desk product.

One more source to strike from your list. Steadily, published 1/5/2026, reported a median of roughly $250,900 for the previous quarter alongside roughly $75 per square foot. Those two figures cannot both describe the same housing stock. Seventy five dollars a foot times any normal Rochester house does not reach $250,900. When a page publishes two numbers that contradict each other on the same screen, stop using the page.

Rate context, so you can hold prices still in your head

Freddie Mac's Primary Mortgage Market Survey for the week ending August 13, 2026 put the 30 year fixed at 6.67%, down from 6.69% the prior week, against 6.58% a year earlier. The 15 year fixed was 5.96%, down from 6.01% the prior week and up from 5.71% a year earlier. Trading Economics noted the 6.67% reading ended a streak of five consecutive weekly increases.

Rates are effectively flat year over year. That matters for underwriting because it removes an easy excuse. When financing costs barely move and the Monroe County median sale price still prints a record $308,500 in May 2026, price movement is coming from supply and mix, not from a rate driven demand swing.

How I actually underwrite in Monroe County

Price per square foot has one honest job in my process: it is a tie breaker between two closed sales I have already decided are comparable. It is never the starting point. The sequence I use:

1. Start with closed sales, not aggregator medians. Three to six closings, same town, same submarket, ideally the same school district boundary and the same municipal versus well and septic situation.
2. Match the era and the structure. A 1955 ranch and a 2001 colonial do not comp each other in Henrietta or West Henrietta regardless of matching square footage.
3. Verify the square footage yourself. Pull the assessor record and compare it to the listing sheet. If they disagree, decide which one you believe and write down why.
4. Price condition in dollars, not in a per foot adjustment. Roof, furnace, electrical panel, water line, foundation, windows. Line items. Actual quotes where you can get them.
5. Only then check per foot for outliers. If one comp lands far off the others on a per foot basis, that comp is telling you something: a finished basement counted, a lot line oddity, a sale between related parties.
6. Compare like against like across submarkets. A city neighborhood figure such as $114 per square foot is a useful contrast point when you are deciding where to deploy capital. It is not an input for a suburban exit price.

A note on what I do not have and will not fake. I could not find published town level median price, days on market or inventory data for Henrietta, West Henrietta, Pittsford, Brighton, Mendon, Rush or Honeoye Falls for any period in 2026. Nobody publishes it in a form I would stake an offer on. Which means the per foot numbers floating around for those towns are being derived from something broader, usually city or county figures, and then dressed up as local. If a source hands you a Pittsford per foot number, ask which closings produced it.

Two forward looking figures, clearly labeled

Realtor.com's 2026 forecast, published 12/19/2025 and covered by WROC and RochesterFirst, ranked Rochester the number two top United States housing market for 2026, projecting 5.3% home sales growth and a 10.3% median sale price increase for the year, on a median list price of $256,900 against a national median around $415,000. That same report put new construction at only 6.8% of listings.

That is a December 2025 forecast, not an August 2026 result. I include it for one reason: 6.8% new construction is a supply fact with real underwriting consequences. Very little new inventory means the existing stock absorbs the demand, which is why renovation exits hold up here and why condition line items move your exit price more than any ratio will.

Also worth flagging honestly: the Rochester Business Journal carried a sidebar headline reading that housing inventory is on the rise in Monroe County while prices also rise. I could not establish the date or reporting period for that item, so I am not treating it as a trend, only as a reason to check current county inventory before you commit capital rather than assuming last quarter's scarcity.

Before you write the offer

If your model has one per foot figure applied across city and suburban submarkets, it is wrong somewhere, and you will find out at resale. Pull real closings, verify the footage, price the condition, and use the ratio last.

I have flipped in these neighborhoods and I now list and sell in them. If you want a second read on comps for a specific address in Henrietta, Pittsford, Brighton, Mendon, Rush, Honeoye Falls or the Finger Lakes towns nearby, bring me the property and your numbers. Schedule a time with me here and we will go through it line by line.

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.