Central Ohio Had More Homes for Sale and Fewer Sales in September

Central Ohio had 6,530 homes listed for sale at the end of September 2026, up 12.3 percent from a year earlier, while closed sales fell 5.7 percent to 2,550, according to Columbus REALTORS®. The median sales price rose 2.8 percent to $334,250.

The figures come from the September 2026 central Ohio housing report, released October 13, 2026 by Columbus REALTORS® and drawn from the Columbus & Central Ohio Regional MLS. They describe a market that kept adding listings and lifting prices even as fewer homes changed hands.

More listings, fewer sales

The supply of homes for sale has been the clearest trend of the year, and September extended it. The 6,530 active listings were higher than the 6,124 the association reported for August 2026, a one-month rise of about 6.6 percent. Sellers kept adding to the pile, with 3,316 new listings in September, up 2.3 percent from a year earlier.

Buyers pulled back. The 2,550 closed sales were down 5.7 percent from September 2025 and below the 2,749 recorded in August, a drop of about 7.2 percent in a month. Homes placed under contract, a signal of sales still to come, fell harder, as the 2,448 pending deals were 12.7 percent below a year earlier. Year to date, closings were still up 1.3 percent at 22,578.

Prices kept climbing

More listings did not translate into cheaper homes. The $334,250 median sale price was 2.8 percent higher than a year earlier, and the average price rose 4.5 percent to $385,013. The median price for the year to date was $340,000, up 3.3 percent.

The September median was below August's $345,500, but a late-summer-to-fall step down is a routine seasonal pattern rather than a sign of falling values. Sellers also captured nearly all of what they asked once they set a realistic number, receiving 98.8 percent of their final list price but only 96.3 percent of their original list price, a gap that reflects homes that started high and were cut before selling.

Columbus REALTORS® 2026 president Gloria Alonso Cannon said buyer demand across central Ohio remains strong and pressed sellers to price accurately from the start rather than count on a bidding war to rescue an aggressive asking price.

Still a seller's market, but looser

The clearest way to see the shift is months of supply, which measures how long it would take to sell every listed home at the current sales pace. That figure rose to 2.6 months in September from 2.3 a year earlier. The report notes it remains below the roughly five to six months conventionally regarded as a balanced market, so central Ohio still leans toward sellers even after a year of rising inventory.

Homes also sat a little longer, with the median days on market reaching 33 in September, up from 30 a year earlier. The direction matters more than the three-day change, because more listings, slower sales and a longer wait all point toward buyers who have modestly more room to compare and negotiate than they did a year ago.

A second data source points the same way

A separate dataset points the same way on the headline trend. Realtor.com's count of active listings in the Columbus metro, published through the Federal Reserve's FRED database, rose to 4,913 in September 2026 from 4,318 a year earlier, a gain of about 13.8 percent. That measure covers a different geography and counts only single-family and condo listings, so its level sits well below the MLS figure, but its direction independently confirms that more homes are for sale.

The same Realtor.com listing-price series shows the median asking price for the Columbus metro easing from a summer peak, slipping to $374,950 in September 2026 from $391,950 in July, the kind of seasonal cool-down that also appears in the MLS sale-price figures. Because asking prices and closed-sale prices measure different things, the two series track the season rather than each other month to month.

How the figures check out, and what they can't say

CREN confirmed the report's year-over-year math against Columbus REALTORS® own September 2025 report, which recorded 5,815 active listings, 2,705 closed sales and 3,240 new listings. Those baselines reproduce the stated changes almost exactly, with inventory up 12.3 percent, closings down 5.7 percent and new listings up 2.3 percent. The 2025 median of $325,000 is consistent with the reported 2.8 percent price gain.

The larger limitation is that the MLS figures all come from one source, the Columbus & Central Ohio Regional MLS, so that report is a single measurement of the market rather than independent confirmation of it. The data is not seasonally adjusted, which is why late-summer declines recur every year. And while the report ties September's slower sales to seasonal cooling and rising mortgage rates, the counts show that fewer people bought, not why.

What to watch next

Columbus REALTORS® publishes its central Ohio report monthly, usually in the second or third week of the following month, so the October 2026 figures should land in mid-November, and Realtor.com's next metro update is scheduled for November 5, 2026. The readings worth tracking are whether active listings keep rising, whether the steep drop in pending contracts feeds through into weaker fall closings, and whether months of supply keeps climbing away from the tight levels of recent years.