Written in September 2026. The market numbers below are from that month and have moved since, so ask us for today's.
Realtor.com put out a report in September 2026 telling a good chunk of the country to hold off until the following week to buy a house. I read it standing in my driveway off M-72, coffee going cold, wondering whether anyone at Realtor.com has ever tried to close on a cottage in Leelanau County in December.
The number itself
The claim, specifically: the week of September 27 through October 3 is the single best week of 2026 to buy, nationally. Median listing prices are supposed to run 3.5% below their summer peak that week, which Realtor.com's senior economist Hannah Jones pegs at roughly $14,000 off a seasonal high of $416,000. Buyer competition is projected to run 30.1% below the peak and 14.4% below an average week. Inventory is supposed to sit 13.3% above a typical week and nearly 32% above where it was back in January. All of that against a mortgage rate parked at 6.76%.
Jones frames the combination as giving buyers "more choices and less urgency," which lets them negotiate from a stronger position even with rates where they are. That's a real pattern across a lot of the country. It is not obviously a pattern here, and Realtor.com doesn't break Traverse City out on its own to check.
What Traverse City did in summer 2026
Here's what the local numbers say instead, per Redfin. Median sale price in July was $459,770, up 16.1% from the same month a year earlier. Median days on market was 52, up from 41 last year. Homes sold held almost flat, up 0.6%.
Sit with that for a second, because it's the opposite of what the national model assumes. Nationally, a longer time on market this time of year usually means sellers are losing leverage and prices soften. Longer days on market plus a rising price at the same time doesn't mean buyers gained leverage; it means the same or fewer available homes are still pulling enough demand to push the price higher, even while it takes longer to land the right one. I don't have a clean explanation for why beyond the obvious one, too many buyers chasing not enough of the right houses, especially anything under $500,000 close to town.
I wouldn't bank on a 3.5% discount showing up on a waterfront listing in Elmwood Township the following week.
It hasn't happened in the years I've been doing this, and I don't have a good reason to think it starts now.
Why the seasonal math runs differently in a resort market
Part of this is who's listing and buying up here in the first place. A lot of our sellers aren't a family in Grand Rapids trying to close before the school year starts. They're second-home owners deciding whether they want to carry a place through another Northern Michigan winter, propane fill-ups and a plow contract included. Some of them do list in the fall for exactly that reason, which lines up with the national data showing more inventory this time of year. We wrote about this same national-versus-local gap on price trends earlier in 2026, and the pattern holds again here.
Aspire North REALTORS®, the regional trade association for agents up here, doesn't publish a week-by-week breakdown the way Realtor.com does, so there's no clean local version of their report to check this against directly. What I can tell you is that Janel has watched this same mismatch between the national calendar and our market repeat for most of her twenty-five years in this business. A slow week nationally has rarely meant a slow week for a well-priced house on Old Mission.
But the buyer side doesn't cool off on the same clock. October is when M-22 fills up with leaf-peepers who drive through Glen Arbor, fall for the color on the hillsides, and start pulling up listings that same weekend. Deer camp brings people home who've spent every August driving past the cottage they've been renting and decide it's finally time to buy it. None of that shows up in a model built around a school calendar and a holiday shopping season.
Up on the Leelanau Peninsula especially, a seller with no mortgage and no urgency just holds their number. A buyer waiting for "less urgency" to turn into a lower accepted offer can wait through the whole ski season and not see it happen.
The rate math still matters, just unevenly
The 6.76% rate is real, and it lands differently depending on who's buying. We see this a lot in our market: a first-time buyer looking at a $350,000 place in town feels every basis point of that rate on the monthly payment, and a slower fall market can help quite a bit, because there's less competition for houses in that price band and a little more room to ask for concessions. A cash buyer looking at a lakefront property doesn't feel the rate at all, and that buyer isn't reading a Realtor.com press release before writing an offer.
The "best week to buy" idea isn't wrong so much as it's aimed at a different shape of market than most of what we sell.
What I'd tell you to do the week of September 24, 2026
If you're shopping in town, in the $300,000 to $450,000 range, fall is a decent window. Fewer people touring, sellers who've been sitting since August getting more realistic, and a real shot at negotiating the smaller stuff (closing costs, a home warranty, an extra week or two before you have to close). Check what's on the market as of September 2026 before you assume the good ones are already gone. That part of the national story holds up fine here too.
If you're shopping waterfront or a peninsula second home, don't wait around for a discount the data says shouldn't exist yet. I haven't seen September's numbers as I'm writing this, and I'm not going to pretend I already know whether days on market keeps climbing or snaps back once the leaves are down. Ask me again in November.
Taylor Brown, Realtor
Taylor@taylorbrownrealtor.com
