Two recent studies, one by the city of Madison and one by a local real estate firm that issues a quarterly market report, both found the previously double-digit rise in single-family home values is cooling off.
The studies use somewhat different methodologies, and one pertains to the city proper while the other evaluates Dane County as a whole, but both provide some comfort to people in the market for a home.
In May, the Madison assessor’s office reported that while home values are still rising, the rise appears to be moderating. In 2022 and 2023, Madison saw a double-digit percent jump in its average home value due in part to high demand, but in the recent study, the rate of increase slowed to 7.8% in 2024 and to 5.2% in 2025. The average single-family home in the city is now valued at $481,300, compared to $315,200 in 2020.
Dave Stark, president of Stark Company Realtors, said his firm’s spring market report, released in late April, found flatter price increases countywide.
“When I read the city report, I thought well, that really squares with ours,” Stark said.
Stark said his company’s report tracks medians rather than averages because he believes they tend to be more stable with a large enough database and therefore they avoid the distortions caused by large outliers, especially on the high end. “I think medians do a better job of kind of getting into the center of gravity of the market as it really exists,” he said.
“What I’ve noticed since October of last year is that the 12-month median, which normally increases pretty steadily month over month, just kind of rolls along flat,” Stark said. “It’s a little bit of a trailing indicator, but it’s been dead flat. It was $439,000 in October and then it was $440 for five straight months, which I’ve never seen before. In April, it went to $441,000 which is almost no increase at all.”
Stark said the size of overbids is down a little bit and his gut feeling is that it’s due to a higher level of “flat out price resistance” on the part of homebuyers.
“More homebuyers have reached the point where they’re saying, ‘I’m not going to extend myself beyond x-price in order to get this house,’” he said.
Another takeaway from the spring report is that inventories are starting to “meaningfully rise,” Stark said.
“We’re up to about 1.6 months of inventory, which doesn’t seem like a lot, but it’s better than we’ve had when compared to previous years where we’ve been one month or even below one month,” he said. “We’re now in that 830-840-850 property range, and we could pass over 1,000 by this fall.
“We haven’t seen that since before the pandemic, and that’s significant.”
