If you've spent any time comparing Andover to other towns on your list, you've probably hit a number that doesn't match the last number you saw. One site says the median home price in Andover is around $866,000. Another says $1.12 million. A third says the median list price is closer to $1.29 million. All three can be true at the same time, and none of them is lying to you.
The reason isn't sloppy data. It's volume. Andover simply doesn't sell enough homes in any given month for a single median to hold still, and the closer you zoom into the town, the worse the wobble gets. That matters if you're using "Andover's median price" as a stand-in for what it actually costs to live here, because right now that number is doing a lot more explaining about sample size than it is about the market.
The Same Town, Three Different Prices
Here's what a handful of recent snapshots actually show, side by side.
| Source and period | Median price | Days on market | Homes sold |
|---|---|---|---|
| Trailing 12 months through this summer | $1,000,000 (sale) | 29 | 298 |
| March 2026 alone | $866,000 (sale) | 21 | 13 |
| April 2026 alone | $1,119,950 (sale) | 23 | 65 |
| Listings live this July | $1,290,000 (list) | 33 | n/a |
Notice that March and April sit right next to each other on the calendar and still land $250,000 apart. That's not a market correcting itself in thirty days. That's thirteen closings in March against sixty-five in April, and a small handful of sales at either end of the price range can drag the midpoint wherever it wants to go.
Why Thirteen Sales Can Swing A Median By A Quarter Million Dollars
A median is just the price in the exact middle of whatever sold. When sixty-five homes close in a month, that middle number is fairly stable because there's enough spread on both sides to smooth out one unusually high or low sale. When only thirteen homes close, one $2.6 million estate or one $700,000 starter can shove the midpoint by tens of thousands of dollars in either direction.
Q1 2026 single-family data for Andover makes the same point from a different angle. Only 24 homes sold in the first quarter of 2026, down from 38 in the same quarter of 2025, yet the median sale price still rose from $1,035,000 to $1,085,000 and price per square foot climbed from $381 to $406. Fewer homes closed, and the ones that did close were pricier. That's not necessarily a market getting hotter across the board. It can just as easily mean the mix of what happened to trade that quarter skewed upmarket, while the buyer behavior underneath stayed steady: median time to offer held at exactly 8 days in both periods, which tells you homes that were priced right kept moving fast regardless of what the headline median was doing.
If you're comparing Andover's price trend to a neighboring town, a single month's snapshot is close to useless unless you also know how many homes actually closed that month.
Andover Is Really Two Markets Wearing One Median
Zoom into the pocket around Phillips Academy and the same instability shows up at a much smaller scale, because far fewer homes trade there in any given stretch.
One neighborhood-level report puts that pocket's median sale price at $2,289,000, up 41% year over year, with homes averaging 75 days on market. A different report from the same data platform, covering the trailing twelve months through mid-2025, showed the same neighborhood at a $1,435,000 median, up 11%, with homes moving in just 21 days. Same neighborhood, same platform, two medians nearly $900,000 apart.
The housing stock explains why the number is so easy to knock off balance. Centuries-old colonials and farmhouses within walking distance of the school typically run $1.2 million to $2 million. Newer construction from the 1960s through the early 2000s, sitting a bit farther from campus, tends to price between $850,000 and $1.1 million. Blend those two housing types together in a neighborhood where only a handful of homes close in a typical year, and a single high-end sale can pull the reported median up by hundreds of thousands of dollars almost overnight.
That premium exists for a reason beyond the school itself. The pocket sits about a mile from downtown, close enough to walk to dinner at Elm Square Oyster Co. or Palmers Restaurant and Tavern, or to catch the free Thursday concerts downtown runs through July and August. Buyers pay for that walkability along with the address. But the price you'd actually pay for it depends entirely on which specific streets and which specific homes you're comparing, not on a neighborhood-wide average built from a thin handful of sales.
What This Actually Means If You're Comparing Towns Or Pricing A Home
Three things follow directly from all of this.
First, if you're stacking Andover against another North of Boston town, use a trailing twelve-month figure, not a single month. The twelve-month median sale price of $1,000,000, up 8% year over year on 298 sales, is a far steadier comparison point than any one month's snapshot, because it has enough volume behind it to absorb outliers.
Second, if you're specifically eyeing the area near Phillips Academy, don't trust a portal's neighborhood median at face value. Ask for the actual closed sales from the past six to twelve months, with square footage and lot size, so you can see whether you're looking at the historic colonial tier or the newer construction tier, because the blended average tells you neither.
Third, if you're selling in that pocket, understand that thin comps cut both ways. With so few closings to draw from, an automated valuation can just as easily undersell your home as oversell it. A pricing strategy there needs to lean on recent, comparable closings rather than a neighborhood-wide number that might be measuring a completely different type of house than yours.
A Few Questions Worth Answering Directly
Is Andover's market cooling in 2026? The month-to-month data doesn't support a clean answer either way. March showed a year-over-year decline while April showed an increase, and both moves are explained more by how many homes closed than by any consistent shift in buyer demand. The steadier read is the twelve-month figure, which shows prices up modestly and homes still selling in under a month on average.
How many homes actually sell in Andover in a typical month? It varies more than most buyers expect, from as few as 13 to as many as 65 in the snapshots above. That range alone is the reason no single month should be treated as the trend.
Does the premium near Phillips Academy hold up if I look outside the immediate pocket? Generally yes, though it narrows quickly. Homes even a short distance farther from campus, in the newer construction tier, price hundreds of thousands of dollars below the walk-to-school colonials, which is worth knowing if proximity to campus itself isn't the deciding factor for your household.
None of this means Andover's numbers are unreliable. It means the town's real story is in the spread, not the single number, and reading that spread correctly is what actually helps you compare it fairly to wherever else you're looking.
If you're weighing Andover against another town on your list, or trying to figure out what a specific pocket of it is really worth, I'd rather walk you through the actual recent closings than hand you a portal average. Laurie Cappuccio books appointments to talk through exactly this kind of comparison before you make a move.
