💰 The Cheap End Is Where Financing Gets Decided
A house that will not pass an appraisal or an inspection narrows your loan options before you ever make an offer. Talk it through before you fall in love with a project. Free, no-pressure pre-qualification with Jarod Sanders, SIRE’s in-house lender.Jarod Sanders · CrossCountry Mortgage · NMLS #2337228
Everybody assumes the cheap houses sell first. It is the most natural thing in the world to believe — lower price, bigger pool of people who can afford it, quicker sale.
In Carterville right now it is backwards, and not by a little.
📊 The Split
Of the 40 houses actively listed in ZIP 62918 as of this morning:
- Under $200,000 — 11 houses. Median time on the market: 143 days. Eight of the ten with a published day count have been listed more than 90 days. That is 80%.
- $200,000 and up — 29 houses. Median time on the market: 72 days. Nine of twenty-seven past 90 days — 33%.
The cheaper half sits roughly twice as long, and is more than twice as likely to still be sitting after three months.
Why the Cheap End Is the Slow End
The number that explains it is not the price. It is the year.
The median house under $200,000 in Carterville was built in 1960, and prices out at about $73 per square foot. The median house at $200,000 and up was built in 2000 and runs about $143 per square foot.
So the under-$200K band is not simply “a smaller version of the same house.” It is substantially older housing stock, and a good share of it needs work. That changes who can actually buy it, in three ways that compound:
- Financing gets harder, not easier. A house that will not pass an appraisal or an inspection can knock out several loan programs at once. The buyer who could afford the payment on a $65,000 house is frequently the same buyer who cannot bring cash for a roof.
- The cash buyers who can are not in a hurry. Investors and flippers can buy anything, but they are buying a spreadsheet, not a home. They bid what the numbers allow and they are content to wait.
- The people who want a starter home usually want a finished one. Very few first-time buyers are looking for a project. They are looking for a house they can move into.
Put those together and the pool for an older, cheaper, needs-work house is narrower than the pool for a tidy $250,000 three-bedroom — even though far more people can technically afford the cheaper one.
The Band That Moves
The fastest-moving slice of Carterville is $200,000 to $300,000: 14 houses listed, a median of 72 days, and the three quickest went in 16, 17 and 18 days. Above that, $300,000–$500,000 is nearly identical at a 70-day median across 11 houses.
That is the part of this market with real competition in it. If you are shopping there, the good ones are gone in under three weeks and “let me think about it over the weekend” is a strategy with a cost.
Three Houses That Show the Pattern — and the Exception
🏡 1401 S Thomas St — $245,000
4 bed, 2 bath, 2,054 sq ft, built 1968, about $119 per square foot. Listed 18 days.
This is the one that settles the argument. It is not new construction — it is a late-1960s house, the same vintage as several listings that have been sitting since spring. It moved anyway. Age is not what makes a house sit.
🏡 1109 Mockingbird Ln — $315,000
3 bed, 3 bath, 2,476 sq ft, built 1978, about $127 per square foot. Listed 31 days.
Also not new. Also moving. At $127 per foot it is priced below the median for its band, which is generally what “moving” looks like from the outside.
🏡 912 Glenn Ave — $95,000
3 bed, 2 bath, 1,800 sq ft, built 1990, about $53 per square foot. Listed 92 days.
The most interesting listing on the board. It is under $100,000 — but it is a 1990 build, not a 1920s one, and it is the newest house in that band by roughly thirty years. It has been listed about 92 days, which is a long time in the $200K band and a short time in this one: the other four houses under $100,000 have been listed 31, 272, 273 and 275 days.
That last spread is worth sitting with. One of the sub-$100K houses sold its first month. Three have been on the market since roughly Christmas. “Under $100,000 in Carterville” is not one market; it is a handful of very different houses that happen to share a price tag.
🏠 Which Band Are You Actually Shopping?
The answer changes the strategy. If you are looking under $200,000 in Carterville you have time and leverage, and you need someone who can tell you which houses are projects. Above it, the good ones go in under three weeks and you need to be ready. Tell us where you are and a SIRE broker will call.
What This Means If You Are Selling
If your house is in the older, lower-priced end of Carterville, the useful thing to know is that your competition is not moving either. A 143-day median is not a verdict on your house. It is the shape of that band.
What it does mean is that the ordinary advice — “price it right and it will go” — is doing more work down here than it does higher up. In the $250,000 range a well-kept house finds its buyer fairly quickly almost regardless. Under $200,000 the buyer pool is thinner and more of them are paying cash or fighting their lender, so condition, access and a realistic price matter considerably more.
And if you are buying down here, the flip side is leverage. A seller 250 days into a listing is in a different frame of mind than one who listed last week. That is not a promise of a discount — we have no way to see any seller’s circumstances from the outside, and we will not pretend otherwise — but time on the market is real information, and it is public.
What We Cannot Tell You
Three honest limits on everything above.
Eleven houses is a small sample. The under-$200,000 band is eleven listings, ten of which publish a day count. A single unusual listing moves that median noticeably. Treat “roughly twice as long” as the finding; do not treat “143 days” as a precise constant.
Days on market is not a price history. We can see how long a house has been listed. We cannot see whether it has been reduced, by how much, or why — that information is not published in what we can access, so we are not going to speculate about it.
ZIP 62918 is bigger than Carterville. It takes in rural ground outside the city limits. Closed sales in this ZIP ran a median of about $247,600 in August, which is in the same neighborhood as the $259,250 median asking price on the active listings — reassuring, but a ZIP-level figure, not a town-limits one.
Everything For Sale in Carterville Right Now
Live listings, newest first — the same feed our brokers work from.
📱 Got a Question About This Market? Text Greg.
Buying? Selling? Not sure where to start? Text Greg Holthaus directly — just tell him you saw his blog. He'll help you think through your decision, match you with the best broker for your situation, and point you in the right direction. He's open to a text any time.
Text Greg · 618.925.8654
Who is Greg Holthaus?
Greg Holthaus is the Owner and Designated Managing Broker of Southern Illinois Realty Experts, with 25+ years in Southern Illinois real estate and more than 10,000 transactions closed. He leads a full-service operation — home sales, mortgage, title, and property management under one roof — with offices in Marion, Herrin, and Carbondale. Meet Greg ›
About the numbers: Active-listing figures are from a pull of local MLS listing data for ZIP 62918 on September 18, 2026, filtered to single-family houses (40 of 68 total listings; the remainder are land and other property types, which are excluded throughout). Time-on-market, price, square footage and year built are as published on the listing records; price-per-square-foot is calculated from listed price and published square footage. Three of the 40 houses do not publish a day count and are excluded from time-on-market medians only, never from the listing counts. Time on market is not a price history — we can see how long a home has been listed, not whether or how it has been repriced, and we do not speculate about it. A listing leaving the market is not evidence that it sold. The August closed-sale median (~$247,600) is from local MLS closed-sale data for ZIP 62918, which takes in rural ground outside Carterville city limits. The under-$200,000 band is eleven listings — a small sample, sensitive to any one unusual listing; the finding is the roughly two-to-one gap, not the exact day count. Listings are represented by various brokerages. Nothing here is an appraisal, a loan offer, or a rate quote. Southern Illinois Realty Experts is an Equal Housing Opportunity brokerage.