If you are interviewing agents to sell a house in Brighton, Henrietta or Pittsford, you are going to sit through at least two listing presentations full of numbers. Percent over asking. Days on market. Months of supply. Year over year change. The slides look authoritative. Most of them are screenshots.

This post gives you five questions to ask a listing agent about every figure they put in front of you. None of them require you to know anything about real estate. They only require you to ask where a number came from and what it counts. By the end you will be able to tell the difference between an agent who pulled data and an agent who pasted it, and you will understand how agents price a home when they are actually doing the work.

One note on my own numbers here. I am not quoting market statistics in this post. Any figure worth putting on paper needs to be pulled fresh for your address, with its geography and reporting month attached, and that is a conversation about your house rather than a blog post. What I can give you is the method I use to check other people's figures, including my own.

Question 1: What geography is this number actually measuring?

This is the question that catches the most errors, and it is the easiest to ask.

"Rochester" is not one thing. It can mean the City of Rochester, Monroe County, the Rochester metropolitan statistical area, or a loose regional label an aggregator invented. Those are different housing markets with different price levels and different sales volumes. A statistic labelled "Rochester" that is quoted to you as a Henrietta home value is a category error, not a comparable.

Ask it plainly:

• Is this the city, the county, the metro area, or the town?
• Does it include the Village of Honeoye Falls separately from the Town of Mendon?
• If this is a Brighton number, does it cover all of Brighton or just the 14618 side?

Geography matters more here than in most markets because our towns sit right on top of each other. A house on the Brighton and Pittsford line can be a fifteen minute walk from a house in a different town, a different school district and a different tax bill. Averaging them together produces a number that describes neither one.

Also watch for mismatched pairs. If an agent shows you a listing count for one geography and a sales pace for another, then combines them into a single ratio, the ratio is meaningless even though both inputs were real.

Question 2: What is the reporting period, and has that month actually closed?

Monthly market reports publish after the month ends, usually a week or two later, because closings need time to record. That means a presentation delivered in the middle of a month cannot contain complete figures for that month. If a slide claims to summarise the month you are currently standing in, it is either a partial count or a projection.

Neither is disqualifying. A partial month can be useful if it is labelled as one. The problem is a partial month presented as a closed one, because partial data tends to undercount, and undercounting active listings makes a market look tighter than it is.

So ask two things. What month is this? And is that month complete? Then ask the follow up that most sellers skip: is this figure a single month or a rolling average? In smaller towns it usually needs to be a rolling one, which brings us to the next question.

Question 3: How many sales is this number built on?

Mendon, Rush and Honeoye Falls close a modest number of homes in any given month. Pittsford is bigger but still not large. When the sample is small, a single month's median price can swing on a handful of transactions. Two large sales close in the same week and the median jumps. Nothing changed about the market.

A careful agent handles this by reporting a rolling three month or twelve month figure and labelling it as such. A careless agent quotes last month's median for a town that had nine sales and presents it as a trend.

Ask how many closed sales are behind the number. If the answer is a shrug, that is your answer. Some town level metrics, particularly months of supply and sale to list ratio, often are not published at town level at all, precisely because the samples are too thin to be meaningful. An agent who tells you that honestly is doing you a favour. An agent who substitutes a Monroe County figure and calls it your town's number is not.

Question 4: How is this metric defined, and does that definition match what I think it means?

Two metrics cause most of the confusion in listing presentations.

Days on market. Some sources measure list date to contract date, which is true market exposure: how long buyers looked before one committed. Others measure list date to closing date, which bundles in a financing and title period that has nothing to do with buyer demand. Those two definitions can differ by a month or more on the same sale. Relisting also resets the clock on many systems, so a house that has been available since spring can show a small number.

This is why you sometimes see a presentation claiming homes sell well over asking price and also claiming a long median days on market. Those two facts look contradictory. Often they are not contradictory at all, they are just measured differently, and one of them is quietly counting escrow. Ask which definition is being used before you draw any conclusion about pricing strategy from it.

Months of supply. This is active listings divided by monthly closed sales. It is a ratio, so it breaks if either input is wrong. Run the arithmetic backwards when an agent quotes you a very low figure. Divide the listing count by the months of supply and you get the implied number of sales per month. If that implied pace looks impossible for the geography named, something upstream is off, usually an undercounted listing feed or two mismatched sources.

You do not need to be rude about this. "Can you walk me through how that was calculated?" is enough. If the answer is that it came off a website, you now know its status: interesting, not decisive.

Question 5: Is your price a CMA or an automated estimate, and how did the interior factor in?

This is the question that decides the money. When people debate CMA versus Zestimate they usually frame it as accurate versus inaccurate. That is not quite it. The real difference is what each one can see.

Here is why the interior matters so much in our towns. Brighton has a lot of mid century houses where two homes with identical square footage on paper can be a full renovation apart: original kitchen and one bath upstairs in one, opened up and reworked in the other. Henrietta subdivisions off Lehigh Station Road and Erie Station Road repeat the same floor plans, which makes them easy to compare and unforgiving when a basement has water history or a roof is at the end of its life. Pittsford carries a tax profile that buyers price in whether or not an algorithm does.

An automated model does not know your sump pump ran twice this spring, that the electrical panel was updated, or that the third bedroom is genuinely small. A person who walked the house does. So when you get a price, ask which comps were used, why those and not others, what was added or subtracted for condition, and which of them an appraiser is likely to lean on. If an agent cannot name the comps, they did not build the price, they inherited it.

What a straight answer sounds like

You are not looking for an agent who has every figure memorised. You are looking for one who labels their numbers, tells you the source, tells you the geography and the period, and says plainly when a figure is not available at the level you asked about. That last one is the real test. Brighton NY home selling decisions, like Henrietta and Pittsford ones, get made on three or four numbers that actually apply to your address. Everything else on the slides is context.

If two agents give you very different list prices, do not pick the higher one. Ask both to defend the comps. The one whose reasoning survives your questions is the one whose price will survive a buyer's agent, a lender and an appraiser.

If you want that walkthrough for your own house, I will show you the comps I used, the adjustments I made and where my number is soft. Book a time with me and bring every question on this list.

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.