What The North Andover Median Doesn't Tell You: The Split Market Behind The $750K Headline

Every portal will tell you the median home in North Andover was listed near $745,000 in July 2026. That number is accurate. It is also, for most buyers actually shopping the town, close to useless.

The reader who anchors on it walks into showings expecting to see three-bedroom single-family homes on quiet streets between Old Center and Lake Cochichewick. What they see instead is a condo, or a small ranch that needs a full kitchen, or an estate lot in the watershed that they cannot easily build on. The town's headline median is doing a very specific thing: averaging two markets that have almost nothing to do with each other.

The two medians that don't agree

Pull the July 2026 all-homes listing median from Movoto and you get roughly $745,000 to $750,000, with about 24 to 26 days on market. Pull the MLS-PIN single-family read for April 2026 that Rosen Real Estate published, and the median sale price jumps to $990,000 with days-to-offer at 7.

Same town, same month range, three different stories. The portal median is being pulled down by condos and townhouses in the roughly $300,000 to $600,000 band, which trade on a different clock than the detached houses buyers usually mean when they say "I want to look at North Andover." The single-family clock is fast, competitive, and priced closer to $1M than to $750K.

Why the gap exists, and why it just widened

The gap has always been there. What changed in the last twelve months is the pressure on the lower half of the spread.

In December 2025, Merrimack College closed on the 588-unit Royal Crest Estates for $254 million, with Lupoli Companies and Atlantic Management named on the deed and the college positioned to expand student housing there. Reporting on the transaction noted that Merrimack was already leasing units at Royal Crest for students, and that the college's separate on-campus expansion, approved by the Planning Board in 2023, is slated to add 540 beds by fall 2026 at the corner of Route 114 and Andover Street.

Read together, those two facts mean roughly six hundred workforce apartments on the Route 114 corridor are on a trajectory toward student-adjacent use, in a town where RentCafe's 2026 read shows the average rent already softening near $2,810 and where 30% of households currently rent. Some share of those tenants will renew somewhere else in town. Some will decide, at rates below where they sat two years ago, that it is cheaper to buy an entry-level condo than to keep chasing a lease.

That is why the condo band feels tight even when the town's overall inventory looks reasonable on paper. New demand is arriving at the exact price point the portal median sits on top of.

What the sub-markets actually look like

Buyers who fly the town on a listings map tend to treat it as one product. It isn't. The four functional sub-markets behave differently enough that they should be underwritten separately.

• Old Center and the Library District — Federal, Colonial, and early-1900s Victorians clustered around the Town Common and Stevens Memorial Library. Walkable, historic, and where the single-family sale prices most cleanly cluster in the $650K to $950K range described by local brokers. Renovation constraints are real; several of these homes date to the 1700s.
• Lake Cochichewick and the Back Country — Larger lots, newer builds on former farmland, and proximity to Weir Hill's four miles of trails. Also the sub-market where the Watershed Protection Overlay District quietly caps what you can do. The town's own planning materials note that building in the watershed requires a Special Permit, and roughly 800 parcels sit inside it.
• Bear Hill and the cul-de-sac neighborhoods — Colonials on tree-lined streets, three- and four-bedroom houses with garages, and the segment most buyers actually mean when they picture the town. This is where the $990K single-family median lives.
• The Route 114 corridor — Condos, townhomes, and the Royal Crest footprint. The most price-accessible entry into the town, and the segment about to absorb the most change over the next few years as the Merrimack College plan phases in.

The watershed rule matters more than most buyers realize. The Stevens Estate purchase in 1995 and the overlay district that followed were designed to prevent development, and they have. The town's inventory constraint is not a market cycle; it is a land-use decision made three decades ago that is still shaping what gets listed today.

The transaction pattern buyers keep misreading

Ask a buyer coming from Boston or from a slower Massachusetts town what they expect, and they describe an offer at asking, one round of negotiation, and a two-week inspection window. The Four Seasons Realty Group outlook for 2026 puts the actual pattern at about three offers per home, sales around 2% above list on average, hot homes 6% above list and pending in roughly 16 days. Realtor.com's May 2026 sale-to-list ratio for the town read 105%.

The friction isn't that homes go above asking. The friction is that the "above asking" happens on the single-family stock, where the median is closer to $990K, not on the $745K figure the buyer wrote down.

That mismatch is where deals fall apart. An offer built around the town median is often 15% to 25% light on the actual clearing price for the specific product the buyer wants. By the time the buyer recalibrates, two or three houses have already gone under agreement in the seven-to-sixteen-day window the data describes.

How to shop this market without anchoring to the wrong number

1. Underwrite by product type, not by town. Ask your agent for the sold-comps median on single-family only, three-bedroom-plus, in the sub-market you actually want. That's the number your offer should orbit.
2. Assume the condo band is competitive on a different axis. Entry-level condos face demand from Royal Crest-adjacent renters over the next 24 months. If you are in that band, do not slow-walk showings.
3. Read the watershed overlay before falling in love with a Back Country lot. The rules that protect Lake Cochichewick's drinking water also constrain additions, tear-downs, and septic changes. This is a conversation to have before an offer, not during inspection.
4. Price the Andover premium honestly. Andover's July 2026 Movoto listing median sat near $1.29M against North Andover's $745K. The gap between the two towns is not evenly distributed across product types. A renovated four-bedroom near Old Center is not $500K cheaper than its Andover equivalent. It is usually much closer.

Redfin's late-2025 migration read showed 78% of North Andover-area searchers looking to stay inside the metro. This is a market being priced by neighbors, not by out-of-state relocators, which is another way of saying: the people bidding against you already know the split.

Frequently asked questions

Is North Andover cheaper than Andover? On the headline median, yes. Movoto's July 2026 reads put North Andover near $745K and Andover near $1.29M. On a like-for-like renovated single-family basis, the gap is materially smaller, because North Andover's own single-family median clears near $990K.

What does the Royal Crest sale mean for buyers, not just renters? The 588-unit complex sold in December 2025 for $254M to a group working with Merrimack College. As those units shift toward student-adjacent use over the coming years, a share of current tenants will look at entry-level condos and small multifamilies as their next step. Buyers competing in that band should expect that pressure to persist.

Can I build or expand a home near Lake Cochichewick? Sometimes, with a Special Permit. The Watershed Protection Overlay District, adopted after the 1986 Giardia outbreak, restricts uses inside the roughly 2,700-acre watershed that drains into the town's drinking-water source. Verify the parcel's overlay status before writing an offer with renovation plans.

Are homes still selling above asking? Yes, on average. Realtor.com's May 2026 sale-to-list for the town was 105%, and local brokerage data described roughly three offers per home with hot properties going 6% over list in about 16 days.

If you are weighing North Andover against Andover, Reading, or Methuen, the right first conversation is not about the town median. It is about which of the four sub-markets fits your budget, timeline, and appetite for renovation friction. That's the analysis Juan Concepcion runs with clients before a single showing gets on the calendar, pairing the local sold-comp data with the mortgage and tax picture that decides whether a house you like is actually a house you can hold. Schedule a consultation and we'll build the number that matters for the home you actually want, not the one the portal median describes.