Half the Houses for Sale Have Cut Their Price

By Greg Holthaus, Owner & Designated Managing Broker · October 5, 2026

This one is a snapshot rather than a report. September’s closed sales have not posted yet — they usually land somewhere between the 9th and the 12th — and the newest complete month in the closed-sale record is still August, in all nine towns we track. So instead of running August’s numbers a second time, we read something we can measure today: every active listing in our own four-county feed, in one pass, this morning.

432 listings came back across Williamson, Jackson, Franklin and Union counties. Six of them are the same property listed twice under two MLS numbers in two different categories, which makes 426 distinct properties. 248 of those are houses.

And here is the finding. 124 of the 248 houses — exactly half — are asking less today than they were asking when they listed. Not one house in the feed has raised its price. Across all property types, 166 listings carry a recorded price change, and all 166 of them go the same direction: down.

The median reduction on a house is $10,000, or 4.9% off the original number. The mean is $17,267, pulled up by a handful of deep cuts at the top of the market. The smallest cut in the set is $100, which is somebody moving a number for the sake of moving it.

Where the Cutting Is Happening

Nine towns have at least eight houses on the market, which is the fewest we are willing to put a percentage next to. Every row below was read in the same hour, which matters: on September 30 we measured Marion at 54% and on October 2 we measured Carterville at 64%, and those were two towns on two different days. These are all one morning.

Every single-family listing in our own four-county feed, read in one pass on the morning of October 5, 2026. These nine towns are the ones with at least eight houses on the market; they account for 202 of the 248 houses in the feed, and the remaining 46 sit in ones and twos — never more than six in any one place — across twenty-one smaller communities. † marks a town with fewer than ten listings, where one house moves the percentage by more than ten points — read those two rows as “four of its eight” and “three of its eight,” not as decimals. The median asking column describes what is currently listed and must not be set against a median sale price. Houses that are easy to sell leave the market quickly, so standing inventory skews expensive in every town, in every market, always.

Carterville leads at 63.6% of its 22 houses, West Frankfort sits lowest at 20.0% of 15. Marion carries the most inventory of any town in the feed at 73 houses and lands at 53.4%, three and a half points above the regional half. The dollar column is steadier in the big towns than the small ones: Jonesboro’s $32,750 median reduction rests on four listings and would move hundreds of dollars if any one of them were different, where Marion’s $10,900 rests on thirty-nine.

These Cuts Are Not New. That Changes What They Mean.

The natural way to read “half the market has cut” is that something happened recently. It did not. Each listing carries the date its price last changed, and when you sort the 124 reductions by age:

• 1 house cut its price in the last seven days.
• 15 cut within the last thirty.
• 54 — nearly half of them — last moved their price more than three months ago.
• The median reduction is 82 days old. The oldest is 257 days, which is a house that has been sitting since January.

So this is not a wave of cutting. It is an accumulation. Half of the houses standing on the market today have, at some point in the last nine months, come down — and then kept standing anyway.

Land Sellers Are Not Doing This

The same feed carries land, commercial buildings and small multifamily. Running the same test across all of it produces the sharpest contrast in this morning’s data.

The multifamily row counts seven listings. It is in the table for completeness, not as a finding. Two further categories in the feed — two manufactured homes in parks and two commercial leases — are left out for the same reason.

Houses cut at 50.0%. Land cuts at 18.4%. That is 2.7 times the rate, on 103 land listings — a sample big enough to take seriously. And when land does cut, the median reduction is $3,400 against $10,000 on a house.

We are not going to tell you why, because we would be guessing at what is in a seller’s head. What we can say is what it looks like from the desk: a house has a carrying cost that runs whether or not anyone is in it, and a vacant parcel mostly does not. Somebody holding ten acres can wait in a way that somebody holding a mortgage and a utility bill cannot. That is a plausible mechanism and it is not a measurement, and we would rather label it than dress it up.

Prices Are Not Falling. Time Is Stretching.

Here is where the asking-price snapshot has to be checked against what actually closed, because “half of them cut” sounds like a market in decline and the closed sales do not say that.

Local MLS closed-sale data. Closings and price are January through August; days on market is January through July in all three years. August 2026 is dropped from the days-on-market column because the figure the source currently carries for that month is not a settled median in any of the nine towns — Marion and West Frankfort are both carrying the identical value of 56.579743982 days, which is a modelled estimate, not a count of days. The price column drops eight town-months inside this window whose median came in under 55% or over 175% of that town’s trailing two-year median; their closing counts are kept everywhere, because a recording batch distorts a price and not the number of sales. The full list is at the foot of this page. 2025 is omitted from this table for width and sits in between in most rows; the two-year span is the comparison, not a trend line through three points.

Three things in that table, in order of how much they matter.

Median sale prices are higher in 2026 than in 2024 in 7 of the nine towns, and lower in 2 — Murphysboro and Anna. Whatever is happening, a general fall in local prices is not it.

Days on market are up in 8 of the nine. Murphysboro is the extreme at 24.5 more days than 2024. Carterville’s increase is 0.5 of a day, which is not an increase; call it unchanged. Anna is the only town in the set that genuinely got faster, by about two weeks.

Closings are down 4.7% across the nine towns — 2,409 against 2,529 in the same eight months of 2024. Two towns need their own paragraph before that number means anything.

Marion: down a quarter, and then most of the way back

Marion closed 24.0% fewer houses than in 2024, the steepest fall of the nine both as a share and in sheer numbers, and quoting that figure on its own would be misleading. Split the year: January through May was down 32.4% — 294 closings against 435. June through August was down only 12.2% — 273 against 311. The gap narrowed by more than half over the summer, and August 2026 closed 101 houses in Marion against 115 in August 2024. The year started badly in the biggest market we cover and then largely recovered. “Marion is down 24%” is true and it is the wrong shape.

Carbondale: a gain that is not a gain

Carbondale reads +21.8% on closings, the only large increase in the table, and it does not survive a look at the monthly detail. March, April and May 2026 recorded 273 closings against 159 in the same three months of 2024 — 114 extra sales in one quarter. Those are the same three months we excluded from the price column, because their median sale prices came in at $30,000, $38,000 and $53,500 in a town whose median for the rest of the year runs near $150,000.

A quarter of unusually cheap, unusually numerous transactions is not a housing market heating up. It looks like a block of property changing hands at once. And the arithmetic is blunt: that one quarter added 114 closings, while the other five months of the year gave back 19 — which is how a town can post a 21.8% gain for the year and still be selling fewer houses than in 2024 for most of it. Set the quarter aside and Carbondale is down 6.9% on closings, not up 21.8%.

Which changes the regional figure too. With that quarter in, the nine towns are down 4.7% on closings. With it out, they are down 9.9%. We think the second number is closer to the truth, and we are showing you both rather than picking the one we like.

So What Is Actually Going On

Put the two halves together. Prices are holding or up against two years ago. Homes take longer to sell in eight of nine towns. Half the standing inventory has reduced, most of it months ago, and the typical reduction is $10,000 on a house — 4.9%, not a collapse.

That is a market where the gap is between asking and selling, not between this year and last. Sellers are not cutting because values fell. They are cutting because a number that would have worked in 2024, when the median house went in 60 days in Marion, now takes 68 — and the extra weeks are when a seller finds out the first number was high. The cut is the market clearing, late.

One more cut of the data, because it is the question a seller always asks: does this hit the expensive houses harder?

Somewhat, at the top. The two dearest bands cut at 54.5% and 57.9%; the two cheaper ones at 46.2% and 43.1%. But the ordering is not clean — houses under $150,000 cut more often than houses in the $150,000 to $250,000 band — so this is a mild tilt toward the top of the market, not a gradient. The deepest three reductions in the feed are all above half a million dollars, which is what you would expect from percentages applied to bigger numbers rather than evidence of anything about the high end.

If You Are Selling

The number that matters is not whether half the market has cut. It is whether your house is drawing showings. A house priced correctly in this market still sells; in the typical one of these nine towns the median house went under contract in 74 days over the first seven months of the year. If your house has been out for two months with little traffic, the data above says you are in a very large group, and that the group has been dealing with it by moving the number, typically by about $10,000 and typically later than it needed to.

The cheaper lesson is to get the first number right. A reduction announces itself to every buyer watching that price band; an accurate opening number does not have to.

If You Are Buying

Half of what is standing has already come down, and nearly half of those reductions are more than three months old. That means the obvious discounts have mostly been taken and did not clear the house — which is information. A house carrying a reduction from three months ago that is still sitting is telling you either that the cut was not enough or that something about the house is the problem, and those call for different offers.

The ones worth watching are the 15 houses that moved in the last thirty days. A fresh reduction is a seller who has just decided to be serious, and the window before the market re-prices around the new number is short.

💰 A Reduced House Does Not Wait For You To Get Ready

One house in this feed cut its price in the last seven days. The other 123 reductions are older than that, and 54 of them are older than three months — which means those houses have been sitting at the reduced price for a full season and are still sitting. A reduction is only an opportunity for a buyer who is in a position to act on it. Get the financing settled while nothing is urgent. Free, no-pressure pre-qualification with Jarod Sanders, SIRE’s in-house lender.Jarod Sanders · CrossCountry Mortgage · NMLS #2337228. Not a loan offer, a rate quote, a commitment to lend, or a guarantee of eligibility.

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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: The price-reduction figures come from our own four-county listing feed covering Williamson, Jackson, Franklin and Union counties, read in a single pass on the morning of October 5, 2026. It returned 432 active listings, of which six are one property listed twice under two MLS numbers in two categories, giving 426 distinct properties; 248 are single-family houses. A listing is counted as reduced when the feed carries an earlier asking price higher than the current one. This is a snapshot of what is standing on the market, not a study of all sellers — houses that reduced and then sold have left the feed, and so have houses that sold quickly at their first price. The share of houses still for sale that have reduced is therefore higher than the share of all sellers who ever reduced, and the standing set over-represents listings that have been on the market a while. The median asking prices in the town table describe current inventory and should not be compared with median sale prices, which measure a different and generally cheaper set of houses. Price changes are only visible where the feed records an earlier price; the statement that no listing has raised its asking price is a statement about the 166 listings that carry a recorded change. Town percentages are shown for the nine towns with at least eight houses listed; two of those nine have fewer than ten, where one listing moves the figure by more than ten points. The age of a reduction is taken from the date the feed last updated that listing’s price label, which is the date of the most recent change, not of the first one. Closing counts, median sale prices and median days on market are from local MLS closed-sale data for the ZIP codes covering Marion, Carterville, Carbondale, Herrin, Anna, Murphysboro, West Frankfort, Johnston City and Jonesboro, covering January through August of 2024, 2025 and 2026. August 2026 is the most recent complete month; September typically posts in the second week of the following month and had not posted for any of the nine towns when this was written. Days on market uses January through July in all three years. The value the source currently carries for August 2026 is not a settled median in any of the nine towns, and Marion and West Frankfort are both carrying the identical figure of 56.579743982 days, which indicates a modelled estimate rather than a count. Eight town-months inside the January-to-August window were excluded from the median-price column only, each having recorded a median under 55% or over 175% of its town’s trailing twenty-four-month median: Carbondale March 2026, April 2026, May 2026; West Frankfort August 2025; Johnston City May 2024; Jonesboro August 2025, February 2026, April 2026. A scan of the full five-year history flags ten such months; the other two fall outside the months shown here. Their closing counts are included everywhere, because a recording batch distorts a price and not the number of sales. Medians shown for a year are the median of that year’s monthly medians, which is not identical to a true median across every sale. Days on market measures list date to contract, not to closing. Closed-sale figures are revised as late sales record, so recent months may shift. The suggestion that carrying costs explain why land sellers reduce less often than house sellers is offered as a plausible mechanism and is not measured in this data. Nothing here is an appraisal, a loan offer, a rate quote, or a commitment to lend. Southern Illinois Realty Experts is an Equal Housing Opportunity brokerage.