HousingWireHousingWire
It may be April 2025, but in Bergen County, New Jersey agents say it might as well be the spring of 2021.
“Every property is going for way over asking with multiple offers. Buyers are waiving inspections and doing appraisal gap clauses. They are doing just about everything. I have even seen non-refundable earnest money deposits,” Joe Tamburo, a Bergen County-based Coldwell Banker Realty broker, said.
Tamburo’s observations are supported by the data. As of early April 2025, the 90-day average number of median days on market was 49 days, well below the 77 days recorded in April of 2021, according to HousingWire Data.
Additionally, HousingWire Data shows that the 90-day average median list price has jumped to $979,999, up nearly $80,000 compared to a year ago and up $250,000 from April of 2020.
Just this past weekend Compass agent Ani Messikian saw one of her listings go under contract for $200,000 over asking.
“The home is in Ridgewood, we listed it for $899,000, and I had over 200 appointments to see it over the weekend — from Thursday evening until Sunday. I think we got 15 offers in total,” Messikian said. “It was crazy. That level is something I would see during the pandemic market.”
According to real estate professionals working in the area, the county’s tight inventory situation is one of the driving factors behind the competitive market and steadily rising list prices.
“There is no inventory,” Tamburo said. “This market is basically the same as the pandemic, but the difference now is that people were able to move then because there was inventory for them to buy.”
Countywide, the 90-day average number of active single-family listings as of early April was 594 homes, slightly higher than the all-time low set in March of 2025 when there was an average of just 565 active single family listings, according to HousingWire Data. As recently as August 2019, Bergen County had an average of over 3,200 single-family homes for sale.
Real estate professionals in the county attribute the tight inventory to the low interest rates many current property owners secured during the pandemic, which they feel are disincentivizing some prospective sellers from listing.
“If someone sells their home and manages to find something to buy, they are going to end up paying even more money for it with a higher interest rate and a lot of people don’t want that,” Tamburo said.
While the interest rate lock-in effect may be holding some sellers back, it is not holding all of them.
“We are definitely seeing some more sellers come on the market, which is nice, but it isn’t enough,” Lisa Comito, the regional manager of Howard Hanna Rand Realty and the immediate past president of the Greater Bergen Association of Realtors, said. “The sellers we are seeing are the people that are looking at quality of life factors. They are starting to question if they are going to live somewhere that no longer fits their life [style] just because of a mortgage rate.”
The data supports Comito’s belief that inventory is starting to rise. HousingWire Data shows that as of early April, the 90-day average number of new single-family listings hitting the market each week is 91, up from 55 in late February, but still well below the average of over 250 new listings hitting the market each week during the summer prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Although the additional listings hitting the market are welcome, they are not nearly enough to satiate the current pool of buyers. In order for significant improvement to occur, Tamburo says there will need to be a meaningful and maintained drop in mortgage rates.
“I’ve been doing this for 37 years and have seen every market,” Tamburo said. “Everything comes in cycles and once interest rates go back down, we’ll get more inventory. No one wants to go from a 4% or even 3% mortgage rate to go buy something that is even more expensive and have an almost 7% rate on it.”
But while Bergen County real estate professionals expect inventory and high levels of buyer competition to remain challenging well into the summer, Comito said the current level of economic uncertainty caused by the Trump administration’s tariffs may change that.
“We are luckily in a location where I don’t think it’s ever going to be totally stagnant, and it hasn’t been even during other slowdowns. But I’m telling my agents who are working with younger buyers to check in with them right now because a lot of them are getting gifts or borrowing money from their parents to help with their down payment and a lot of them may have just taken a hit in the stock market,” Comito said. They need to check in with those clients to make sure that gift or the money they are looking to borrow is still there.”
Even prior to the economic uncertainty of the past week, Messikian said she had noticed more trepidation from some buyers, especially first-time buyers.
“Younger buyer that are first-time buyers who don’t have equity that they’re pulling from another property are a little bit more careful as to how high they are going. During the pandemic, when rates were at 3% and money was cheap, they might go $100,000 over asking and it would not make a big dent in their mortgage payment, but now they are thinking twice and may only go $50,000 over asking,” Messikian said.
Still, Messikian remains optimistic about the strength of the area’s housing market.
“Our area is still very strong. Bergen County is kind of in a bubble with access to New York City and all of the great schools. We still have a lot of people moving here from the City, Queens, Brooklyn — we just have a lot of people moving in and a lot of cash buyers, so I don’t expect it to really hurt us,” Messikian said.
