Published September 25, 2026 in Market Update

For Every 10 Staten Island Homes That Sold, 2.4 Gave Up

By Christopher DiToro

Real estate, Market Update cleaned

I pulled every listing in my market data, through September 24, 2026, and one number stopped me cold. For every 10 homes that sold, 2.4 gave up. They came off the market with no sale, never came back, and are not for sale now. That is 344 homes. Nobody talks about that number. Everybody talks about what homes sell for, how fast they go, whether buyers are paying over asking. The homes that never make it to closing? They disappear quietly, and the story disappears with them.

528 homes came off the market without selling, and most of them never came back

Here is how the 528 breaks down. 36 came back and sold. 148 are for sale again right now. 344 are simply gone. No sale, no second chance, no closing table. That last number is the one I want to sit with.

The homes that gave up first asked $728,500, on average. The homes that sold first asked $718,500. That is a $10,000 gap. On its own that sounds small. But it points to something real: the homes that gave up started just a little higher, did not find a buyer at that price, and never adjusted enough to get one.

The mistake is not pricing too high by a lot. It is pricing too high by just enough to lose the buyer. A seller who starts at $728,500 and holds there while the market moves on is not being stubborn on purpose. They are watching the days add up, then quietly pulling the listing. That is how 344 homes end up in this column.

The highest-priced homes gave up at nearly twice the rate of the middle of the market

This is where the number gets specific, and specific is useful. In the $650K to $800K range, 13.9% of homes gave up. That is the lowest give-up rate of any price range. In the $950K and up range, 28.7% gave up. Nearly 3 in 10. The $650K to $800K range also sold the most homes: 454. It is the deepest pool of buyers on the Island right now.

Under $550K, 22.3% gave up. That is a surprise to a lot of sellers who assume lower prices always move. They do not, not automatically. The under-$550K homes also took the longest to sell of any range: 49 days. Buyers in that range often have tighter financing, and with Freddie Mac's weekly rate survey putting the 30-year fixed rate at 7.03% as of September 24, 2026, up from 6.30% a year ago, that pressure is real.

At $950K and up, the give-up rate jumps again. Those homes also took 49 days to sell when they did sell, and buyers paid only 97% of what the home first asked. The higher the price, the smaller the buyer pool, and the less room there is for a price that is off by even a little.

Right now, nearly half the homes for sale have already dropped their price

There are 797 homes for sale on Staten Island today. Of those, 375 have already cut what they first asked. That is 47.1%. The typical cut is $30,000, which works out to about 4.5% of the first asking price. At the pace homes are selling right now, all 797 would be gone in 3 months. That is a seller's market by the numbers. But nearly half the current listings have already had to drop their price to stay in the game.

Those two things are not a contradiction. A tight market still punishes the wrong price. The homes moving in 3 months of supply are the ones priced where buyers are. The ones that already cut are the ones that started somewhere else.

What this means if you are selling, and what it means if you are buying

If you are selling, the give-up number is the thing to take seriously before you pick a price. The homes that sold in their first month got 100% of what they first asked. The homes that took over 6 months got 91.9%. That is an 8.1 percentage point gap, and it grows with every week a listing sits. The one move that protects you is starting where the buyers already are, which on this market is the $650K to $800K range if your home fits there. If it does not, price it to the pocket it is actually in, not the one above it.

If you are buying, 148 of the homes that came off the market with no sale are listed again right now. Some of those sellers have had time to think. A home that gave up once and came back is not a home to avoid. It is a home where a real conversation about price is more likely. National existing-home sales fell 2.0% in August 2026 to a pace of 3.98 million, and months of supply nationally rose to 4.9 months (NAR). Staten Island is tighter than that at 3 months, but the national picture means buyers everywhere have a little more room than they did a year ago. Use it.