Is It a Seller's Market? The Four Numbers That Answer It

Every headline about the housing market describes a place nobody lives. Massachusetts contains 351 municipalities, and inside a single one a starter condo and a $2 million colonial can be in opposite markets on the same Tuesday. The regional number is an average of things that are not comparable, and averaging them destroys the only information you needed.

The useful question is narrower and entirely answerable: what is the market for houses like mine, in my town, in my price band, right now? Four measures answer it.

1. Months of supply

The most informative single number in residential real estate, and the least quoted.

Take the active listings in your segment and divide by the number of sales per month in that same segment. The result is how long it would take to sell everything currently for sale if nothing new were listed. It converts two numbers nobody can interpret — inventory and sales volume — into one that means something.

The conventional reading is that a low figure describes a seller's market, a high figure a buyer's market, and something in the middle a balanced one. The exact thresholds get argued about and vary by market type, which is precisely why the direction of travel is worth more than the level. Supply at four months and falling is a different instruction than supply at four months and climbing, and the second one arrives before any price data shows it.

Compute it for your segment. Single-family homes between $800,000 and $1,000,000 in one town is a segment. Massachusetts is not.

2. The list-to-sale price ratio

The closed price divided by the last asking price, across recent sales in your segment. It tells you what actually happens to a number once it is tested.

Read it with one deliberate caution: the denominator is the last asking price, not the original one. A house that listed at $1,100,000, reduced to $950,000 and sold at $950,000 produces a ratio of 100% and a story of failure. So look at the ratio against the original list price too. The gap between the two is the cost of mispricing in your segment, stated in cash, and it is the most persuasive figure there is in a pricing conversation.

3. The shape of days on market, not the average

Average days on market is the most misleading statistic published about housing, because the distribution is not remotely symmetrical. A market where most houses go under agreement in ten days and a handful sit for nine months produces an unremarkable average and describes neither group.

Look at the spread instead. What share of sales in your segment went under agreement within two weeks? What share is still active after ninety days? Those two percentages tell you how forgiving the market is, which is the actual question. A segment where nearly everything sells quickly punishes a high price sharply and briefly; a segment with a long tail punishes it slowly and expensively.

And know what resets the clock and what does not. Days on market is a field with rules, and withdrawing and relisting can restart it while the property's history stays visible to any agent who looks — a subject price reductions takes up directly.

4. The withdrawal and expiration rate

The number nobody publishes and everybody should look at: what proportion of listings in your segment ended without a sale. Those are the prices the market refused, and they draw the ceiling more accurately than the sales do, because a sale only proves somebody paid that much — a withdrawal proves nobody would.

A segment with a high failure rate is a segment where pricing is doing most of the work, and where the penalty for getting it wrong is a season rather than a week.

Two more signals that lead the data

Showings per listing in the first week. The most current information available anywhere, and it exists before a single new sale closes. It is also the only one of these measures that is about your specific house.
The pending count against last month's. Pendings turn into closings six to eight weeks later, so a change in pendings is a change in the closed data you will be reading in the autumn.

Both of these move before the comps do, which is why a market can turn while every published number still describes the one before it.

Where the numbers come from

Segment-level data for Massachusetts comes out of MLS PIN and is compiled by the Warren Group and by the state and local Realtor associations. Your agent can run any of these four for your exact segment in a few minutes, and if the answer is a regional figure rather than a segment one, ask again.

No figures are quoted here on purpose. Any level printed in a blog post is wrong by the time somebody reads it, and a stale market statistic is worse than none because it is quoted with confidence. Why the town guides matter is the same point geographically: conditions vary sharply between neighbouring towns, and the town is the smallest honest unit of description.

Reading the four together

They do not always agree, and the disagreements are the interesting part.

Low supply, high list-to-sale, short market times. A seller's market in that segment. Price at market and let competition work; pricing above it still costs you, because the first two weeks are where the competition happens and you cannot reclaim them. Pricing strategy covers why.
High supply, list-to-sale well under 100%, long market times. A buyer's market. Price to be one of the two or three best-value houses in the segment on day one, and expect the negotiation to continue after the inspection.
Low supply but weak list-to-sale. Usually means the inventory is poor rather than the demand strong. A genuinely good house in that segment can do very well.
Supply falling while market times lengthen. Often the earliest sign of a turn — sellers have started withdrawing rather than reducing.

What it changes for a buyer

The same four numbers tell you how hard to compete and what the realistic offer looks like. In a tight segment, the levers are price, deposit size, timeline and appraisal-gap coverage — and not the inspection, which since October 2025 is not something a seller may ask you to give up under the 2025 inspection law. In a soft segment, the lever is patience, and the best house of the month is often the one that has been sitting for sixty days. Winning a bidding war covers the competitive end in detail.