The Roebling Index — New Jersey

The median sale of a house or 1-4 family home in Millburn–Short Hills was $1.87 million in 2025. In Montclair it was $1.355 million, in Ridgewood $1.20 million. The Roebling Index for New Jersey tracks 12 northern New Jersey towns, from Alpine to Westfield, using every recorded sale since 2020 rather than a sample of listings.

What the 2025 figures show

• The top of the market is Alpine and Saddle River, on few sales. Alpine's median was $3.675 million on 15 sales and Saddle River's $2.55 million on 31. That is too few sales for a change figure, so each shows a median only. Millburn–Short Hills, at $1.87 million on 184 sales, is the highest with a full year of sales behind it.
• Since 2020, medians are up 43% to 86% in the nine towns with enough sales for a change figure. Summit is at the low end and Madison at the high end.
• The 2020 starting point is a low one. Sales in the first half of 2020 ran at about half the volume of the second half across these towns, so every change since 2020 starts from a disrupted year.
• Some one-year moves are large. Madison's median rose 31.4% in 2025, on 83 sales, Summit's 19.2% on 179, and Upper Saddle River's 15.2% on 108. A median moves with which houses happened to sell. The same-house measure, which separates price change from the mix of houses sold, is not published for any New Jersey town yet: it needs 75 repeat sales touching both 2020 and 2025, and the best-covered town, Westfield, has 35 in 2020 and 39 in 2025.
• Price per square foot is highest in Millburn–Short Hills at $695, then Summit at $661 and Chatham Borough at $654.
• Two years are left blank. The state's file flags no sale as usable for the second half of 2022 in Chatham Borough and the second half of 2025 in Glen Ridge, so those years are incomplete and withheld. Glen Ridge therefore has no 2025 median.

How the Index is built

The source is the deed record. The New Jersey Division of Taxation publishes every recorded sale in its SR1A files, and the Index counts sales of $50,000 or more between unrelated parties, dated by deed. Condominiums and sales the state marks as not usable are excluded, and so are sales of several parcels under one price (under 2% of sales in any town).

The segment is houses and 1-4 family homes. The state's residential class covers homes of up to four families and has no field that separates single-family houses from two-to-four-family homes, so the figures include both.

Two measures, each answering a different question:

• Median sale is what a typical house or small multifamily home cost that year, in dollars at the time of sale.
• Price per square foot uses the living area reported on the sale record. It is shown for a year only when at least 75% of that year's sales report living space, which is why Upper Saddle River, where most 2022–2025 records have none, has no price per square foot for those years.

Price changes are in dollars at the time of sale. Adjusted for inflation with the consumer price index, the same gains since 2020 are 15% to 50%.

Each town is the whole municipality the state files its sales under. Millburn–Short Hills is Millburn Township, which includes Short Hills, and Chatham Borough is the Borough of Chatham, not Chatham Township, which is a separate municipality. A figure is withheld rather than estimated when there were too few sales to support it: a median needs 10 sales, and a change between two years needs 60 in both.

Questions

Why do these medians differ from brokerage market reports?

Market reports count closings on the multiple listing service, usually for a single property type. The Index counts every recorded sale of a house or 1-4 family home, including private and off-market transactions, and dates each sale by its deed, so the two can differ. This New Jersey series has not yet been reconciled against listing-service figures.

Which number should I use to value a house?

None of them on its own. A town median describes the market, not a particular house. A valuation starts from comparable sales of similar houses.

Why does the Index start in 2020?

The state's published sales files begin with 2020.

How current is it?

Full-year 2025. Recorded sales for 2026 are still being filed, so 2026 is not shown. It is updated as new recorded sales are published.