Why do four different real estate sites show four different prices for the same nine-thousand-person borough, sometimes eight months apart, sometimes in the same week?
If you've been comparing Leonia to Fort Lee, Englewood, or Tenafly before making an offer, you've probably already run into this. One site says the median sold home went for $639,000 in January 2026. Another says $810,000. A third, checking listings instead of closings, puts the current asking median near $999,000. None of these numbers is fabricated. All of them are technically accurate. And none of them tells you much about what a house in Leonia actually costs right now, because the math underneath a "median" quietly breaks down once the number of sales gets small enough. In Leonia, it's small enough.
The Same Town, Four Different Prices
Here's what four sources reported, with the exact window each one covers:
| Source | Data Window | What It Measured | Figure |
|---|---|---|---|
| Homes.com | July 2026 | Median sold price, single-family homes | $789,500 |
| Homes.com | July 2026 | Average sold price, single-family homes | $864,921 |
| Movoto | January 2026 | Median sold price (14 homes sold) | $639,000 |
| Movoto | July 2026 | Median asking price, active listings | $999,000 |
| Redfin | May 2025 | Median sold price (2 homes sold) | $810,000 |
| Zillow | ongoing estimate | Average home value (algorithmic) | $780,000 |
Read that table again and the spread is the story. Movoto's own page shows a $360,000 gap between a sold-price median in January and an asking-price median six months later. Redfin's May 2025 figure was built from exactly two closed sales that month, down from eight the year before. A median calculated from two transactions isn't describing a market. It's describing whichever two houses happened to close escrow that month, whether that was a modest Cape on a side street or a renovated colonial on Grand Avenue.
Why a Median Breaks When the Sample Is This Small
A median works the way it's supposed to when you have enough transactions that outliers cancel out. In a town the size of Hackensack or Fort Lee, dozens of homes close every month, so a handful of unusually cheap or unusually expensive sales get absorbed into the middle. Leonia doesn't have that volume. The borough covers about 1.63 square miles and holds roughly 3,350 housing units total, bordered by Fort Lee, Ridgefield Park, Englewood, Teaneck, and Palisades Park. Redfin's own count of 2 sales in a month and Movoto's count of 14 in a different month aren't two data points on a smooth curve. They're evidence that Leonia's monthly transaction count is so low that a single high-end sale, or its absence, can move the median by tens of thousands of dollars without the underlying market shifting at all.
This is also why days-on-market numbers disagree just as sharply. Redfin logged an average of 91 days on market in May 2025, up from 70 the year before. Movoto logged a median of 62 days for its January 2026 sold homes, up from 17 the prior year, but only 23 days for July 2026's active listings. Both point to slower absorption. Neither is measuring the same pool of houses.
The Housing Mix Makes It Worse
A median doesn't just get noisy from low volume. It gets noisy from what kind of home happens to sell. Leonia's housing stock is genuinely mixed: roughly 61 percent single-family detached homes, about 17.6 percent large apartment or high-rise units, about 13.4 percent duplexes or homes converted into small apartment buildings, and around 7.7 percent rowhouses and other attached homes. Nearly 40 percent of that stock was built before 1939.
When a month's closings skew toward duplexes near Broad Avenue, the median drops even if single-family prices haven't moved. When it skews toward a renovated colonial, the median jumps for the same reason. You're not watching the market change. You're watching the mix change.
A median built from a dozen sales a month isn't a price. It's a coin flip that happens to land on a dollar figure.
Where the Real Friction Hides
None of the sold-price data explains why closings in a town like this can take longer than buyers expect, and that's where the actual local mechanics matter. Leonia's building department maintains a Certificate of Continued Occupancy requirement tied to residential and commercial resales and rentals, a step that runs through town hall rather than through any listing portal. Given that close to 40 percent of the housing stock predates 1939, that inspection is more likely to surface something, an outdated electrical panel, a code issue tied to a prior addition, that adds real days to a closing timeline no portal is tracking. That friction shows up in the days-on-market numbers as noise about the housing stock, not the market.
If you're buying one of Leonia's duplexes or converted multi-family properties, there's a second local wrinkle worth knowing before you make an offer. Owners of rental units in Leonia have been required since 2022 to supply a lead-paint-free certification to the borough, with recurring inspections every three years or at tenant turnover. If you're planning to rent out a unit in a pre-1939 duplex, that's a compliance step to budget for, not just a line item on an inspection report. The borough has also adopted a multifamily overlay ordinance in recent years aimed at affordable housing, a signal that Leonia's zoning around multi-unit properties has been actively evolving rather than staying static, which matters if you're comparing what's buildable here to what's buildable in a neighboring town.
What to Track Instead of the Median
None of this means Leonia's data is useless. It means the headline number is the wrong thing to anchor on. A few things actually hold up when the sample is this small:
- Price per square foot, over a trailing twelve months, not a single month. Redfin's $421 per square foot figure from May 2025 is more stable than any single median because it normalizes for house size, though even this should be read as a rolling trend rather than a snapshot.
- Direct comps within the same housing type. A single-family colonial and a duplex a block off Broad Avenue aren't in the same price conversation, even if they're both "a Leonia home."
- Asking price versus sold price, tracked separately. Movoto's $999,000 asking median for July 2026 and its $639,000 sold median for January 2026 are not describing the same market softening or strengthening. They're describing two different stages of the same funnel.
- Days-on-market direction, not the raw number. Whether DOM is 62 days or 91 days matters less than whether it's trending up from where it sat a year earlier, which both Redfin and Movoto agree it was.
For a buyer weighing Leonia against Englewood or Tenafly, that means asking your agent for the trailing comps on the specific housing type you want, not the town-wide median a portal generated from whatever happened to close that month.
FAQ
Why did Leonia's price per square foot fall while other figures suggested prices were rising? Because a median sale price and a price-per-square-foot figure respond differently to what kind of home sold. A month with fewer, smaller homes closing can push the per-square-foot number down even while the raw median holds or rises, especially in a market this thin.
Is Leonia's housing market actually slowing down? The days-on-market trend across both Redfin's and Movoto's sold-home data points that direction, with homes taking longer to close in 2025 and early 2026 than the year before. That's a more reliable signal than any single median, because it's measuring the same behavior (time to close) rather than a price that shifts with the sales mix.
Does Leonia's Certificate of Continued Occupancy requirement apply to every sale? Yes, it applies to residential and commercial resales and rentals alike, and it's worth confirming with the borough's building department early in a transaction given the age of the housing stock.
If you're weighing a move into Leonia, or trying to figure out what a specific house, duplex, or multi-family property is actually worth against comparable sales rather than a townwide average, that's exactly the kind of read Scott Selleck and The Selleck Group build before writing an offer. Schedule a consultation and we'll walk through the actual comps for the property you're considering, not the number a portal generated from whichever two houses happened to close last month.
