Two numbers from Realtor.com's December 2025 report on Rochester keep coming up in first conversations with buyers: an average borrower FICO of 744 and an average down payment of 15.9 percent. Both are real. Both get misread constantly. This post explains where those figures come from, what they describe, what they do not require of you, and how to plan around them if you are shopping in Henrietta, West Henrietta, Pittsford, Brighton, Mendon, Rush or Honeoye Falls.

I will also tell you plainly where the public data runs out. There is a lot of it, and knowing the gaps matters more than most people realize.

Where the 744 and 15.9 Percent Come From

In December 2025, Realtor.com published its forecast of top U.S. housing markets for 2026 and ranked Rochester number two nationally. The report forecast 5.3 percent home sales growth and 10.3 percent median sale price growth for 2026. To support the ranking, it cited borrower characteristics in this market: an average FICO score of 744, an average down payment of 15.9 percent, and 82.5 percent conforming loans, all above national peer averages.

Three things to hold onto about that source.

• It is a forecast published in December 2025, not a measurement of what happened this year.
• The 744 and 15.9 percent are averages of people who already closed. They are a description, not an entry requirement.
• The same report noted Rochester's median home age is around 1966 and the median homeowner age is around 55, and tied that aging stock and low turnover to persistently tight supply. That last point affects you more than the FICO number does.

What a 744 Average Actually Tells You

An average is pulled up by everyone above it. Cash-heavy repeat buyers, move-up buyers with two decades of credit history, and people refinancing out of a paid-down mortgage all sit inside that 744. First-time buyers do not represent the average. They sit below it, and they close anyway, every month.

The practical question is not "do I have 744." It is "what does my score do to my rate and my mortgage insurance." Loan pricing moves in tiers. Crossing from one tier into the next can change your monthly payment noticeably, while gaining points inside the same tier changes nothing. A lender can tell you in one phone call which tier you are in and how far you are from the next one. That call is free and it is the single highest-value hour of a first-time buyer's prep.

What I have watched actually move the needle for buyers asking about the credit score to buy a house in Rochester:

• Paying a revolving balance down below the reporting threshold rather than closing the account.
• Leaving old accounts open. Length of history is doing work for you.
• Not opening anything new. A furniture card in April can cost you in June.
• Disputing genuine reporting errors early, because corrections take weeks, not days.
• Getting a full lender pull rather than relying on a free consumer app score. Those often differ from the mortgage scoring model.

The 15.9 Percent Down Payment Is Not a Requirement

This is the number that stops people cold, and it should not. The average down payment in Rochester NY being 15.9 percent does not mean lenders here ask for 15.9 percent. It means the pool of closed borrowers, including people who sold a house and rolled equity into the next one, averaged out there.

An average down payment sits high in a market with older stock and low turnover, because a large share of buyers are not first-time buyers. They are people who owned something for fifteen years and brought the proceeds with them. You are not competing with their savings account. You are competing with their offer.

Low down payment loan programs exist and are used in this market constantly. Your lender will walk you through which ones you qualify for. What I want you to understand is the tradeoff, because nobody explains it well:

• Less down means more house sooner, and a higher monthly payment. You pay mortgage insurance until you reach the equity threshold your loan program sets.
• More down means a lower payment and less flexibility. Money in the house is not money available for a furnace.
• Closing costs are separate. They are not part of your down payment. Budget for them as their own line.
• Your offer's strength is not purely about down payment percentage. Timeline, contingencies and how the offer is written all read to a seller.

One more thing on that Realtor.com data point: 82.5 percent of Rochester loans were conforming. That tells you most of this market transacts under the conforming loan limit. For a first-time buyer, that is good news. It means the financing everybody understands and prices competitively is the financing that fits the housing stock here.

What You Are Actually Buying Into: The Market Numbers

Here is every verified market figure I have, with its reporting period attached. I am not going to round them into something friendlier.

Note that the $308,500 and the $319,900 are not the same kind of number. One is the median price of homes that closed. The other is the median asking price of homes sitting active. They measure different things and should never be stacked against each other.

On rates: 6.67 percent this August against 6.58 percent last August is a nine basis point move. Essentially flat. If someone tells you rates are the reason to rush or the reason to wait, that is a nine basis point argument. Freddie Mac's chief economist described rates as relatively stable at that level in the August 13, 2026 release, and noted affordability had improved versus a year earlier. He also commented on national listing prices and national inventory. Those national comments are not statements about Rochester, and I see them repeated as if they were.

Henrietta Starter Homes and the Data Gap Nobody Admits

Here is the part most agents skip. There is no reliable public source for median sale price, days on market, inventory or price per square foot in Henrietta, West Henrietta, Pittsford, Brighton, Mendon, Rush or Honeoye Falls. I looked. County-level figures exist. Town-level figures for this corner of the county do not exist in credible, dated public form.

The aggregator sites will happily show you a town number anyway. Be careful with those. One national aggregator's Penfield page recently returned a list of "neighborhoods in Penfield" that were actually City of Rochester neighborhoods. Another source has published town figures that contradict themselves outright: homes selling well over asking price while supposedly sitting on the market for seven weeks. Those two things cannot both be true. When a page tells you a market is red hot and sluggish in the same paragraph, the page is wrong, not the market.

What that means for a Rochester first time home buyer looking at Henrietta starter homes: the number that matters to you is not on a website. It is the set of actual closed comparable sales for the specific street, the specific era of construction, and the specific condition tier you are shopping. Those come out of the MLS, and someone has to pull them and read them.

Reading them is the work. A 1966 ranch with original windows, a 1966 ranch with a ten-year-old roof and updated electrical, and a 1966 ranch that was flipped last spring will list within twenty thousand dollars of each other and are not remotely the same purchase. I have been inside enough of these houses to tell you the difference shows up in the basement and the panel box, not in the listing photos.

A Sequence That Works

1. Get a lender pull. Learn your actual mortgage score and which pricing tier it lands in.
2. Ask that lender for two or three loan scenarios at different down payment levels, with the full monthly payment including taxes, insurance and any mortgage insurance. Monroe County taxes are a real line item. See them before you fall for a house.
3. Set your number on monthly payment, not purchase price. Price is what you offer. Payment is what you live with.
4. Get comps pulled for the specific towns and price bands you are targeting, since the public sources will not give you that.
5. Then start walking houses, with a clear idea of what condition you can afford to inherit.

A 744 average and a 15.9 percent average describe the crowd. They do not describe the door you have to walk through. Plenty of people close here well below both.

If you want to know what your numbers actually support in Henrietta, Rush, Mendon or anywhere else in south Monroe County, and see the real comparable sales behind it, book a time with me. No pressure, no pitch. Bring your questions and I will show you the data I am working from.

Khem Kadariya

About this data

The figures in this post were compiled from publicly available sources including Houzeo, Zillow, RochesterFirst, the Rochester Business Journal and FRED (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis), 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.