HARRISBURG, Pa. (WHTM) — Nationally, the trend is unmistakable: The real estate market is back in balance, with buyers no longer outbidding each other to pay above asking price while waiving what have been traditional rights, like the ability to inspect an expensive home before buying it.

America now has fully a half million more sellers

than buyers.

But in central Pennsylvania?

“We are still in a seller’s market — strongly in a sellers market,” said Wendell Hoover, a Realtor with Iron Valley Real Estate of Central Pennsylvania. “So if you price a home correctly, you will get multiple offers. You will sell it during that first seven to 14 days.”

Good news if “you” are a seller; less so for buyers, who still find themselves in hot competition with one another, Hoover said.

Publicly available data corroborate that account: With fewer exceptions than at any time in recent memory, the a real estate sales heat map published by the National Association of Realtors shows once-sleepy northeastern U.S. markets — including places like Lancaster, now No. 11 in all of America — as among the hottest in America, with once-hot Sunbelt markets ice cold by comparison.

To be clear, this is all relative: A comparable home still costs far more in Miami than it does in Harrisburg. But the gap has narrowed, and in terms of metrics such as how quickly homes are selling, places like Hartford, Connecticut, and Rochester, New York — synonymous, in the minds of some people, with population declines and places whose economies peaked many decades ago — are (respectively) now the fourth- and seventh-hottest markets in all of America, according to the heat map (as of April 2025, the latest month for which data is available).

What’s supporting the historically high prices here? Partly — Hoover said — the fact that they’re only high by local standards.

“If you’re from here, you’re like, ‘Man, prices are high,’” Hoover said. “But if you compare us to everywhere else around us, we’re a great deal.”

So someone moving here from a more expensive region — and indeed, people are moving here; no other Pennsylvania county is growing as quickly on a percentage basis as Cumberland County — is likely buying a home for less than they’re selling another for and doesn’t negotiate the same way as someone with less buying power.

Central Pennsylvania was always a slow-and-steady market — no booms like the Sunbelt experienced from about 2001 through 2005, but no busts either like what happened from 2006 through 2009.

“Then COVID happened and totally changed the market,” Hoover said, thanks partly to trends like remote work: people could earn Philadelphia or Washington, D.C., salaries while living here. “Prices increased drastically — for us, drastically. And now we’re back to our normal 3% to 5% annually.”

Elsewhere, high interest rates — which, to be sure, exist here as much as anywhere else — have combined with other forces (such as skyrocketing home insurance costs and huge assessments from condo associations after hurricanes and the deadly condo collapse in Surfside, Florida) to depress prices.

One micro-trend within the broader trend?

More than ever, “ranch homes are highly desirable,” Hoover said of single-story, stairless homes. “I have several buyers looking for ranches, and we are often competing quite a bit on a ranch home.”