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We get the same question every week, and it is a fair one: is this a buyer’s market or a seller’s market?
In Carterville this morning, the two numbers everyone uses to answer it point in opposite directions. Not slightly. Opposite.
📊 Two Numbers, One Town
- 1.9 months of supply. 68 active listings in ZIP 62918 against an average of about 36 closings a month over June, July and August. Anything under four months is the textbook definition of a seller’s market. 1.9 is not close to the line.
- 95 days. That is the median time on the market for the houses that are actually sitting there for sale right now. Twenty of the thirty-seven that publish a day count have been listed more than ninety days — since June or earlier. Six have been listed 240 days or more.
A seller’s market where more than half the houses have been waiting since June. Both figures are correct.
How Both Numbers Can Be True
Start with the honest caveat, because it matters: any snapshot of unsold houses will always look slower than the houses that closed. That is arithmetic, not insight. The homes that sold quickly are gone; what is left on the shelf is, by definition, what has not sold yet. So “actives are slower than closings” is never news.
What is news is the shape of the pile. Here is how the thirty-seven houses with a published day count break down:
⏱ The Shelf, by Age
- 30 days or less — 7 houses. The genuinely current inventory.
- 31 to 90 days — 10 houses. Normal for this market.
- 91 to 180 days — 14 houses.
- More than 180 days — 6 houses, all of them past 240.
Seventeen of thirty-seven are inside ninety days. The other twenty are not.
That is what the months-of-supply figure misses. The calculation treats a house listed in January as competition for a house listed last week, and functionally it is not. A buyer walking in today with an ordinary three-month search window is choosing among roughly seventeen houses, not forty. Measured that way, supply is tighter than 1.9 months, not looser.
And the 1.9 is already the conservative version. That number counts all 68 listings — including 25 vacant lots and three other property types — against closings that are mostly houses. Run it on the 40 houses alone and you get about 1.1 months. Whichever way you cut it, this is not a market with a surplus of homes. It is a market with a surplus of patient homes.
What Actually Sells, and How Fast
The other half of the answer is in the closed sales, and it needs three years to make any sense. Here is January through August, ZIP 62918, for each of the last three years:
| January–August | 2024 | 2025 | 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Homes closed | 247 | 331 | 240 |
| Typical month’s median days on market | 55 | 74.5 | 58 |
| Volume-blended median sale price | $182,500 | $233,000 | $220,100 |
Local MLS closed-sale data, ZIP 62918, January–August of each year. “Typical month’s median” is the median of the eight monthly medians — an approximation, not the same statistic as a true eight-month median. The blended median weights each month’s median sale price by that month’s number of sales.
You could write the headline two ways from that table, and only one of them is honest.
The alarming version: Carterville closings are down 27% from last year.
The useful version: Carterville closings are down 2.8% from 2024, at a median price about 21% higher, in about the same number of days. 2025 was the outlier — and it was the outlier on the high side. More sales, higher prices, and, notably, the slowest of the three years.
That last detail is the one worth keeping. In 2025 the typical month’s median sale took 74.5 days. This year it is 58, and in March and April it was 52 and 47 against 103 and 99 a year earlier. Houses in Carterville are selling faster than they did during the busiest year in recent memory. There are simply fewer of them changing hands, at a price that gave back about 5% from that peak.
Down volume, up speed, prices off the top by a nickel on the dollar. That is not a buyer’s market and it is not a frenzy. It is a thin, fast, selective market — which is a real thing with real consequences for both sides.
The Pocket Nobody Expects: New Construction
Here is the finding that surprised us this week, with an immediate warning attached: it rests on five houses.
Carterville has five active listings built in 2020 or later. They have been on the market 76, 86, 117, 126 and 246 days. Every one of them is past the seventy-five-day mark, and the median of the five is 117 days — well above the town’s 95.
Two weeks ago, on September 11, this series ran a post whose whole premise was how unusual it is for Carterville to have houses for sale that were built in the last two years. There were three of them then. All three are still for sale — at 86, 117 and 126 days. We are not going to call that a trend on a sample of five. But it is a straight answer to a question buyers ask constantly — does the new stuff go instantly? — and in Carterville right now the answer is no.
There is a plausible mechanism, and it is the mirror image of what we found here on September 18 about the cheap end. A brand-new house is priced at the top of the local per-square-foot range, which shrinks the pool of buyers who can reach it. A buyer who can reach it usually has options, including building. So the newest houses and the oldest houses sit for opposite reasons, and the houses in the middle are the ones that move.
One update on that September 18 post while we are here. Split by price, the eleven houses under $200,000 have been listed a median of 137 days and the twenty-six at $200,000 and up a median of about 82. A week ago those same figures were 143 and 72, so the roughly two-to-one gap has closed to nearer five-to-three. That is worth writing down and far too short a window to call a change in anything.
Three Houses Inside the Window That Closes
If the typical Carterville sale closes in about 58 days, these three are sitting in and around that window. None of them is stale and none of them is brand new to the market.
🏡 513 Dogwood Ln — $349,900
4 bed, 3 bath, 2,886 sq ft, built 1970, about $121 per square foot. Listed 43 days.
Forty-three days puts this in the faster half of everything for sale in Carterville, against a 95-day median for the shelf as a whole. Nearly 2,900 square feet priced below the town’s $126-per-foot median is, more often than not, what “moving” looks like from the outside.
🏡 1627 S Division St — $284,900
4 bed, 3 bath, 2,154 sq ft, built 1934, about $132 per square foot. Listed 52 days.
A 1934 house asking above the town median per foot, and it is moving at roughly the pace of the average Carterville sale. Put it next to the five houses built since 2020 that have all been listed longer, and the lesson is the one this series keeps arriving at from different directions: vintage is not the variable. Condition and price are.
🏡 203 Cora Mae Ct — $450,000
5 bed, 3.5 bath, 4,156 sq ft, built 2007, about $108 per square foot, on roughly 0.61 acre. Listed 79 days.
The largest house of anything in Carterville still inside ninety days, and at $108 a foot it is priced under the town’s $126 median despite sitting near the top of the price range. Seventy-nine days at this price point is unremarkable — the upper end here has always taken longer, because the number of local buyers at $450,000 is small and most of them are already homeowners with something to sell first.
🏠 Buying or Selling in Carterville? The Answer Is Different for Each.
If you are selling, the question is whether your house lands in the group that moves in two months or the group that is still here at Christmas — and that is mostly decided in the first three weeks. If you are buying, the question is which of the twenty long-listed houses is actually worth your time. Tell us which side you are on and a SIRE broker will call.
If You Are Selling in Carterville
The number to hold on to is 58 days, not 95. Houses in Carterville are closing faster this year than they did last year, and there are not many of them for sale. That is a good position.
The number to be honest with yourself about is that twenty of your thirty-seven competitors have been sitting since June, and almost none of them planned on that. What separates the two groups is decided in the first three weeks, on price and condition and photographs, and it is very hard to recover from afterward. A house that misses its opening does not usually get faster later; it gets a price reduction and a longer story to explain.
If You Are Buying in Carterville
Your leverage is real but it is concentrated. It is not “the market” — at 1.9 months of supply there is no general softness to lean on. It is those twenty specific houses past ninety days, and the six past 240.
Two cautions. First, time on the market is information, not a discount: we can see how long a house has been listed and nothing at all about the seller’s situation, so anyone who tells you a 250-day listing is desperate is guessing. Second, a house sits for a reason, and sometimes the reason is a good one — the price was ambitious, the photos were bad, the road is busier than it looks on a map. Half the value of walking through a long-listed house with a broker who works this town is finding out which kind of reason you are dealing with before you get attached.
What We Cannot Tell You
Days on market is not a price history. We can see how long a home has been listed. We cannot see whether it has been reduced, by how much, or why, and we will not speculate.
A listing disappearing is not a sale. Pending, withdrawn, expired and simply edited all look identical from outside.
ZIP 62918 is bigger than Carterville. It takes in rural ground outside the city limits, so every figure here is a ZIP-level figure, not a town-limits one.
Five houses is not a sample. The new-construction finding is five listings. Treat it as an answer to “is the new stuff flying off the shelf” — no — and not as a rule about new houses in Southern Illinois.
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📱 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.
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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 come from a pull of local MLS listing data for ZIP 62918 on September 25, 2026 — 68 total listings, of which 40 are single-family houses, 25 are vacant land and 3 are other property types. Three of the 40 houses do not publish a day count and are excluded from time-on-market medians only, never from listing counts, so time-on-market figures are based on 37 houses. Price per square foot is calculated from listed price and published square footage. Closed-sale figures — closings, median sale price and median days on market — are from local MLS closed-sale data for ZIP 62918 through August 2026, the most recent complete month. “Typical month’s median days on market” is the median of the eight monthly medians for January–August and is an approximation, not the same statistic as a true eight-month median; the “volume-blended median” weights each month’s median sale price by that month’s number of sales, which likewise approximates rather than equals a true eight-month median. Months of supply divides active listings by the average monthly closings for June–August 2026; the 1.9-month figure counts all 68 listings against closings that are predominantly houses, so it overstates supply, and the houses-only version is about 1.1 months. 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. ZIP 62918 takes in rural ground outside Carterville city limits, so all figures are ZIP-level rather than town-limits. The new-construction finding rests on five listings and the under-$200,000 figures on eleven — small samples, sensitive to any single unusual listing. 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.