Wareham's median sale price falls 5% even as sales and price per square foot rise

WAREHAM Wareham's median sale price fell 5% this summer, but the homes that sold brought more per square foot than a year ago. The median price for July to September was $498,762, down from $525,000 in the same three months of 2025, according to Redfin, a national real estate brokerage. Meanwhile, the median price per square foot rose 8.8%, to $404.28 from $371.71, and sales rose to 100 from 84.

Redfin reports town figures in three-month windows, so these numbers compare July to September 2026 with the same months of 2025. It counts only sales made through listing services, so private sales are not included. With about 100 sales in three months, a handful of large or small homes can move Wareham's median noticeably.

When the median price falls while the price per square foot rises, it generally means smaller homes made up more of the sales, not that the same homes lost value. That makes the 5% drop a poor gauge of what any one house is worth. Zillow's home value index, which estimates the value of a typical home rather than tracking what sold, put Wareham at $483,772 in September, up 3.1% from a year earlier.

Slower sales, stronger offers

Homes took longer to sell but drew stronger offers when they did. The median home spent 30 days on the market, seven days longer than a year earlier, Redfin data show. Yet 42.9% of homes sold for more than their asking price, up from 34.5%, and the average sale came in at 100.2% of the list price, up from 99.5%.

Redfin counted 195 homes for sale at some point during the three months, up from 182 a year earlier, and 100 still for sale at the end of September, up from 71. That is 3.1 months of supply, up from 2.6. Owners put 114 homes up for sale, about the same as the 116 a year ago, at a median asking price of $529,588, up from $487,000.

In Redfin's rolling figures for the past year, the median sale price peaked at $534,000 in the three months ending in June and has slipped in each window since, to $515,000 for the window ending in July and $499,000 for the one ending in August.

Rates, taxes and new homes

The average 30-year fixed rate was 7.40% in Freddie Mac's survey for the week of Oct. 15, up from 6.27% a year earlier. On Wareham's median price, with 20% down, principal and interest at that rate come to about $2,763 a month, by our arithmetic, or $301 more than the $2,462 the same loan would cost at last year's rate. Taxes and insurance are extra.

Wareham's median was about $150,000 below Plymouth County's September median of $648,549, according to Redfin, though Wareham ran higher on price per square foot than the county's $378.05. The county figures cover a single month, so the comparison is not exact.

The town's average single-family tax bill rose to $4,087 for fiscal 2026, up $126, or 3.2%, from $3,961 in fiscal 2025, state Department of Revenue figures show. That is about half the statewide average of $8,113. The town taxes all property at a single rate of $8.56 per $1,000 of value, and the average single-family assessment was $477,438.

Wareham authorized 33 new homes from January to August, according to Census Bureau permit data, which the town reported for all eight months. Twenty-two were single-family houses, eight were in four two-family buildings and three were in one building with three or four units.

Wareham is an adjacent community under the state's MBTA Communities law, required to zone for at least 1,297 multifamily homes. The town has adopted zoning, and the Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities listed it in interim compliance, with its district compliance application in review, as of Aug. 31.

Owners and renters

Most Wareham households own their homes, 83.5% by Census Bureau American Community Survey estimates for 2020 to 2024. The survey's median rent was $1,504, and 42.5% of renters spend 30% or more of their income on rent. Zillow's observed rent index, which tracks asking rents on homes offered for rent, was $2,592 in September. Zillow had no year-earlier figure for the town.

Label: Reported by us, from public housing market data and records.