Pull up Andover's home price trend for March 2026 and the market looks like it's cooling fast, down 16.7% year over year to a median of $866K. Check the same town a month later and prices look sharply higher, with a reported median well north of $1.1 million. Ask a Merrimack Valley agent working straight from MLS-PIN data about the same stretch and you'll hear a third story: both list prices and sale prices climbed steadily through the quarter.
All three numbers are real. None of them describe the same market, because in a town where somewhere between 13 and 65 homes close in a given month, the median isn't tracking value. It's tracking whichever homes happened to sell.
Why the same town produces three different headlines
Andover doesn't sell enough homes in any single month for a median to behave the way it does in a larger market. Redfin counted 13 closed sales in March 2026, down from 27 the year before. Movoto counted 65 in April, up from 55. A Q1 2026 recap built directly from MLS-PIN data logged 24 single-family sales for the quarter, down from 38 in the same period the year before.
Every one of those is a small sample. And small samples are exactly where a median stops measuring appreciation and starts measuring mix. If March's 13 closings happen to include a run of starter capes near downtown, the median drops. If April's larger batch includes several Shawsheen Heights colonials or a new-construction sale on a premium lot, the median jumps. Nothing about the underlying value of Andover real estate has to move at all for the headline number to swing 20 or 30 points in either direction.
Here's the spring laid out side by side:
| Reporting Window | Homes Sold | Median Price | Change vs. Prior Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| March 2026 (Redfin) | 13 | $866K | down 16.7% |
| April 2026 (Movoto) | 65 | $1,119,950 | not reported, but far above the other two windows |
| Q1 2026, Jan-Mar (local MLS-PIN recap) | 24 | $1,085K sale / $1,025K list | up from $1,035K / $986K |
Three legitimate sources. Three different months. Three different stories about the same eleven weeks of the same town.
What actually held steady across that same Q1 window is more telling than any of the price figures. Median time to offer stayed at 8 days in both Q1 2025 and Q1 2026, even as the median sale price moved and the number of closings dropped by more than a third. Speed didn't change. That's worth sitting with, because it means buyer urgency in Andover hasn't cooled even in a quarter where the closing count fell. The price headline moved because of which homes sold, not because buyers backed off.
The same pattern shows up at the neighborhood level
If you want proof this is structural and not a fluke of citywide reporting, look inside Andover at Shawsheen Village, the historic district tucked between High Street and Route 28, bordered by the Shawsheen River Reservoir and threaded by the Shawsheen River Trail. It's a walkable pocket of brick mill-worker housing built for managers at the old Shawsheen mills, much of it converted into condos like The Balmoral, sitting a short walk from Penguin Park and a short drive from Andover Country Club.
Redfin's most recent read on that specific district showed the average house price up 81.8% year over year. That's not a typo and it's not a sign that Shawsheen Village suddenly became the hottest address in Essex County overnight. It's the same small-sample math playing out at an even smaller scale. A trailing twelve-month average sale price for the broader Shawsheen Heights area, which smooths out month-to-month noise by design, sat closer to $762,184, up a far more believable 2%. Same neighborhood. Two numbers that tell entirely different stories, depending on whether you're looking at one recent month or a full year of closings.
A median built on a dozen sales isn't wrong. It's just answering a much narrower question than most buyers think it is.
It's not unique to Andover
Buyers comparing Andover to North Andover run into the identical problem one town over. A March 2026 read on North Andover showed the median at $640K, up 40.7% year over year, on 23 sales against just 7 the prior March. A separate local report for April put North Andover's median closer to $990K. A trailing three-month figure through May landed around $849,492. Three numbers, one town, one spring.
None of that means North Andover's market is unpredictable or that its data can't be trusted. It means the same rule applies everywhere in this price range: when the monthly sales count is small enough to count on two hands, the month-over-month median is a mix indicator first and a value indicator a distant second. That matters directly for anyone weighing Andover against North Andover on price alone, because the headline gap between the two towns can look larger or smaller depending purely on which month each site happened to update.
What to actually watch instead
A handful of numbers moved steadily enough this spring to mean something on their own, without needing a full year of averaging to make sense.
- Price per square foot across the full quarter. Andover's Q1 2026 figure climbed from $381 to $406, a real move that held across three months of closings rather than one.
- Days to offer. Flat at 8 days in Q1 2026 versus Q1 2025 despite fewer total sales, which tells you buyer urgency hasn't eased even as the closing count dropped.
- Sale-to-list ratio and competitiveness score. Andover scored 87 out of 100 on Redfin's competitiveness scale this spring, with average homes selling close to list price and hot homes still going above it. That's a demand signal a single median can't give you.
None of these require waiting a full year to interpret, and none of them get swamped by whether a particular month happened to include a cluster of luxury colonials or a run of smaller capes.
What this means if you're comparing towns right now
If you're weighing Andover against North Andover, or against any town in the Merrimack Valley, resist the urge to screenshot a single median and treat it as the answer. Ask which window it covers, how many homes closed inside it, and whether the steadier numbers underneath (price per square foot trend, days to offer, sale-to-list ratio) tell the same story or a different one. That's the comparison that actually holds up across a full buying season instead of collapsing the moment next month's numbers post.
This is exactly the kind of read we walk clients through every week at DiPietro Group, because a town's real estate story rarely fits inside one headline number, and the towns we work in, from Andover to North Andover, are small enough that this kind of noise shows up every single quarter. If you're commuting in from Boston and trying to make sense of what these numbers mean for your search, our guide to commuting from Andover covers the other half of that decision.
FAQ
Is Andover's market actually up or down right now? Depends entirely on which month you ask, and that's the point. The steadier signals from Q1 2026, rising price per square foot and flat days to offer, point to a market that's firm rather than cooling, even in a quarter where the median swung and the closing count dropped.
How should I compare Andover to North Andover if the numbers keep disagreeing? Don't compare single median headlines side by side. Compare price-per-square-foot trend lines and days-to-offer across a full quarter for each town. Those numbers are far less exposed to the mix-shift noise that makes any one month's median unreliable in a market this size.
Ready to get a clearer read on what your specific home or search actually looks like against this data? Schedule a free buyer or seller consultation and we'll walk through the current numbers together, neighborhood by neighborhood.
