West Frankfort Has Two Housing Markets

By Greg Holthaus, Owner & Designated Managing Broker · September 17, 2026

I pulled every active listing inside the West Frankfort ZIP this morning — no price filter, no property-type filter, the whole town. Forty-six came back. Thirty-seven of them are houses; the other nine are vacant land, a duplex, and a couple of odds and ends.

Then I sorted the 37 houses by price and found something I did not expect. West Frankfort does not have one housing market. It has two, and they barely touch.

The Median Hides Two Different Towns

Split those 37 houses by where they sit — the numbered and named streets of the original town grid on one side, the roads, lanes and terraces outside it on the other — and the two halves look like they belong to different counties.

Nine of the 37 houses are asking $200,000 or more. Seven of those nine are outside the grid. All five of the houses asking $400,000 and up are outside it — and every one of the five was built between 1992 and 2004, on acreage, running 2,400 to 6,400 square feet.

I want to be honest about the line I drew: a couple of those addresses sit close enough to the edge of town that you could argue them either way. Move one or two across and the shape does not change. The pattern is real.

Which means the $109,700 median — the number a buyer sees quoted for West Frankfort — describes almost none of the actual houses for sale. It is the average of an old, cheap, in-town market and a newer, larger, rural one. Nobody is shopping the middle, because there is barely a middle there.

Fifteen Houses Under $100,000, and What That Really Buys

Fifteen of the 37 — forty percent of the town's for-sale houses — are asking under $100,000. That is the most genuinely affordable inventory of any town we track, and it is why West Frankfort keeps showing up on buyers' lists once they widen their search.

But look at the per-foot numbers inside that group before you get excited. One of them is a six-bedroom, four-and-a-half-bath house of 3,175 square feet asking $60,000. That is $19 a foot in a town whose median asking price is $79 a foot. Another is 1,135 square feet at $22 a foot. A third is 2,948 square feet at $25 a foot.

Nobody priced those houses wrong. A house asking a quarter of what the town asks is telling you something, and what it is usually telling you is roof, furnace, wiring, or foundation — sometimes all four. Eleven of the houses in this town with a stated build year went up before 1950.

That does not make them bad buys. I have watched people take a $60,000 West Frankfort house and end up with a home they love and real equity in it. But you are buying a project, and the discount is money you spend later, with a contractor, on his schedule. Go in with your eyes open and the bottom of this market is one of the best values in Southern Illinois. Go in expecting a bargain that needs nothing, and it will be the worst weekend of your year.

The Number That Actually Moved This Year

Forget prices for a second, because in a town this size the monthly median is noise — West Frankfort's has bounced between $70,250 and $147,000 in the last twelve months with nothing underneath it changing. Watch how long houses sit instead.

In March, the median West Frankfort home took 107 days to go under contract. In July it took 55. August came in near 57. That is the market cutting its own time in half over five months, and it is the cleanest signal in the data.

Closings back it up. Forty-five homes closed here in August against 28 in August of last year. Over the full twelve months ending in August, 345 homes sold versus 384 the twelve months before — still down about ten percent, but that deficit was built last winter, not this summer.

What that means if you are selling

Your competition is not 37 houses. It is your half of those 37. If you own a 1930s house on a numbered street, your comps are the other 23 in-town houses asking a $66-a-foot median — not the $127-a-foot place out on Knox Road with four acres around it. Pricing off the wrong half is the single most common way a West Frankfort listing ends up sitting 107 days instead of 55.

What that means if you are buying

Decide which West Frankfort you actually want before you start looking, because they are shopped completely differently. If you want square footage, a newer build and some land, there are thirteen of those and five of them are over $400,000 — that is a thin, specific market and you should move when the right one shows up. If you want to own a house for under $100,000 in a town with a school district, a hospital ten minutes away and an interstate exit, there are fifteen of those sitting right now and you have time to be picky.

What I Tell People About West Frankfort

West Frankfort gets skipped by buyers who set a search radius around Marion and never widen it. That is a fifteen-minute mistake. The town has the cheapest real housing stock in Franklin County, it sits on I-57, and the market has gotten measurably faster every month since March. The catch is that the listing photos will not tell you which of the two West Frankforts you are looking at — the price per foot will. Learn that number and this town gets a lot easier to shop.

💰 Fifteen Houses Under $100,000

A purchase price under $100,000 changes what your payment looks like — and a fixer changes which loan you can use. Find out what you qualify for before you fall in love with a house.Jarod Sanders · CrossCountry Mortgage · NMLS #2337228 · Not a loan offer, rate quote, or commitment to lend. Equal Housing Opportunity.

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🏠 Want the West Frankfort Numbers for Your Street?

Town medians are a backdrop, not an appraisal — and in a town with two markets in it, they are a worse backdrop than usual. Tell us where your house is and we will send you what actually sold near it.

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 counts, asking prices, square footage, build years and days-on-market figures come from local MLS listing data for ZIP code 62896 (West Frankfort), pulled the morning of September 17, 2026, and reflect that moment only — listings change daily. Closed-sale counts, median sale prices and median days on market come from local MLS closed-sale data for the same ZIP, current through August 2026. Asking prices are what sellers are asking, not what homes sell for. The in-town versus outside-the-grid split was made by address type — numbered and named streets versus roads, lanes, terraces and circles — and a small number of addresses near the edge of town could reasonably be assigned either way. Twelve-month totals are sums of monthly figures over the stated window. Single-month medians in a town this size are volatile and are not used here to describe price direction. Equal Housing Opportunity.