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Every few weeks we stop and look at what Marion’s numbers actually say, rather than what the mood says. This is one of those. The short version: fewer houses are selling than two years ago, the ones that sell are selling for more, and what is sitting on the shelf is priced well above either.
Fewer Sales, Higher Prices
Take the first eight months of the year and compare them straight across, same months each year, so the seasonality we wrote about on Monday does not distort it.
| January–August | Houses closed | Median closing price |
|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 746 | $184,000 |
| 2025 | 731 | $200,000 |
| 2026 | 567 | $211,200 |
Median closing price is the median of the eight monthly medians, not a single figure for the whole period.
Closings are down 22% from 2025 and 24% from 2024. Over the same stretch the median closing price is up about 15% from 2024. Those two facts sit together more comfortably than people expect. A median describes the middle of whatever actually sold, so if the mix of houses changing hands shifts — fewer of one kind, the same number of another — the middle price can rise while the total falls, with no house anywhere gaining a dollar. We are not going to tell you which of those is happening here, because closed-sale counts and medians cannot separate them. What we can say is what the two numbers are.
What it does mean is that a slower market is not automatically a cheaper one, and anyone waiting for volume to drag Marion’s prices down has now waited two years while the opposite happened.
The Number That Matters Most: What Is For Sale Is Not What Is Selling
Here is the comparison worth taping to the fridge. In August, the typical Marion house closed at $229,901. Right now, across the 105 houses actively for sale in the ZIP, the typical asking price is $289,900.
That is a $59,999 gap — the shelf is priced about 26% above where sales are actually landing.
Turn it around and it gets sharper. Of those 105 houses, 39 — fewer than four in ten — are asking less than what the typical Marion house actually closed for. A buyer working at the middle of this market is not choosing from a hundred houses. They are choosing from thirty-nine.
This is not a claim that every asking price is wrong. Asking prices should sit above the last set of closings, because a house that is for sale is a house that has not yet met a buyer, and the mix of what is listed is never the mix of what sold. But a 26% spread is wide enough that a seller who prices to the shelf rather than to the closings is pricing against the other unsold houses instead of against the market.
More Than Half Have Already Cut
This is the part we have never been able to show before. Our own listing feed records a price change and the price it changed from, so for the 70 Marion houses in it we can see who has moved and by how much.
38 of the 70 have cut their asking price. Not one has raised it. The median cut is $13,000, or about 4.4%. The largest is on 15063 Baker Dr, down $75,001 from $675,000 to $599,999 — an 11% reduction.
So sellers are already adjusting, in numbers. And yet the gap above is what remains after all that cutting. Inside that same 70-house group the asking median still sits about $105,000 above August’s closing median, and a $13,000 cut closes roughly an eighth of that distance. The cuts are real and they are not finished.
The Builders Are Not Cutting, and That Explains Something
Split those 70 by whether the house is newly built, and the behaviour separates cleanly.
| For sale | Have cut | Median cut, among those that cut | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Resale houses | 63 | 36 | $15,000 |
| Newly built houses | 7 | 2 | $2,000 |
Five of the seven newly built houses have not moved their price at all, and the two that did came down $3,000 and $1,000 — 1.3% and 0.2%. On the resale side, 36 of 63 have cut, by a median of $15,000 among those that moved.
That is worth connecting to something we found in Carterville five days ago: there, the houses built since 2020 were sitting markedly longer than the town’s older stock. We noted the pattern then without being able to say why. This is a plausible mechanism. A builder carrying the cost of construction has less room to come down than an owner who bought years ago at a lower price, so the resale seller can move on price where the builder cannot. That is reasoning, not something these numbers prove — we can see that the two groups behave differently, not why. The same divergence shows up in Marion’s day counts: the seven newly built houses have been listed a median of 74 days against 44.5 days for the other 62.
Seven houses is a very small group, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. One sale changes that median. Treat it as a consistent story across two towns that is worth watching, not as a finding.
Three Houses That Show the Spread
These are not the best buys in Marion. They are the three that make the numbers above concrete.
410 E Allen Ave — $122,000
3 bed · 1.5 bath · 1,880 sq ft · built 1921 · 69 days listed · $65 per square foot
The most square footage of any Marion house under $130,000, and comfortably inside the reach of a buyer working at the closing median rather than the asking median. It has already come down $5,000 from $127,000, in late August. At $65 a foot it is less than half the town’s median of $147 — which is what a 1921 house tends to look like on paper, and why the walkthrough matters more than the arithmetic here.
1400 E Parham St — $226,000
3 bed · 2 bath · 1,340 sq ft · built 2026 · 133 days listed · $169 per square foot
Of everything for sale in Marion, this is the house priced closest to what the town actually closed at in August — $3,901 away from $229,901. It is brand new. And it has been listed 133 days having moved just $3,000. It is the whole post in one listing: an asking price level with the market’s own closings, barely moved, and still for sale.
1800 Wren Dr — $474,000
4 bed · 3 bath · 4,340 sq ft · built 2003 · 50 days listed · $109 per square foot
The largest house for sale in Marion under $500,000, and the cheapest per square foot of anything above $400,000 — $109 against a town median of $147. Down $11,000 from $485,000 in August. The per-foot number is the one we keep running into in this market: the biggest houses are routinely the cheapest per square foot, which is worth knowing before anyone treats a low per-foot figure as a bargain on its own.
🔮 What Greg Watches Next
Two things. First, whether the cutting continues into the winter — more than half of these houses have already moved once, and a second round of cuts on the same listings would say something the first round does not. Second, September’s closings, which land in the second week of October. That is the month the seasonality numbers say should be Marion’s busiest, and this year it is the month arriving after rates crossed 7%.
If You Are Selling in Marion Right Now
Price to the closings, not to the shelf. The houses you are competing with ask a median of $289,900; the houses that actually sold closed at $229,901; and of the 70 Marion listings in our own feed, more than half have already cut. Among the 69 houses we can match to that feed, 18 have now been listed longer than 90 days and three longer than 180. We cannot tell you from these numbers that pricing high is what put them there — a day count is not a price history, and we have only each listing’s most recent change. But the gap between the shelf and the closings is the first thing we would look at on any house that has sat.
If you are buying, the useful read is that the middle of this market is thinner than the listing count suggests, and that the newly built end of it is where the least negotiating room is sitting.
🔔 Wondering Where Your Marion House Actually Sits?
Send us the address and we will tell you where it lands against what has been closing — not a computer estimate, a broker looking at the comparable sales. Same thing if you are buying and want to know whether an asking price is realistic before you write an offer.
📱 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: Closed-sale figures come from local MLS closed-sale data for ZIP 62959, sixty months through August 2026, pulled September 30, 2026. September 2026 closings are not out yet — they typically publish in the second week of the following month — so August is the most recent complete month and every year-over-year comparison here uses January through August for all three years. Active-listing figures come from a same-day pull of active local MLS listing data for ZIP 62959, filtered to single-family houses: 105 houses out of 169 total listings, with land, commercial and other property types excluded throughout. Two different groups of houses are quoted and they are not interchangeable. The $289,900 asking median and the 39-of-105 count describe all 105 houses in the ZIP. The price-change findings — 38 of 70, the $13,000 median cut, the builder comparison — describe only the 70 Marion houses carried in our own brokerage feed, because that is the only set for which we can see a previous price. That 70-house group skews more expensive than the ZIP as a whole, with an asking median of $334,950 against $289,900, which is why the headline gap uses the broader pull. A price-change record is not a complete price history: it shows the most recent change and the price before it, so a house that has cut three times shows only its latest step, and the total reductions in this market are therefore understated, not overstated. One data caution worth stating plainly: the published median days-on-market for January, February and March 2026 is an identical 89.0 in all three months, and August 2026’s figure is the only one in sixty months that is not a settled median. We have therefore described the direction of time-on-market through the year rather than quoting those particular monthly figures, and we have not built any claim on them. All asking prices are on homes currently for sale, not closed sales. Price per square foot is calculated from listed price and published square footage, which is as published on the listing record and not independently verified. Time on market is not a price history, and a listing leaving the market is not evidence that it sold. ZIP 62959 takes in rural ground outside Marion city limits. 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.