What We Fixed in Our Housing Data

We found four problems in how we count Indiana housing data. All four are now fixed. We also rebuilt the full history using the corrected method, so there is no seam in any chart and no point where the old way stops and the new way starts.

The four problems

We were throwing away listings because of county lines. Every association has a list of counties it serves, and a listing outside that list was discarded. The rule existed to stop a home listed in two MLSes counting twice, but it also deleted plenty of listings that were not duplicates at all. We replaced it with real address matching, so a record is removed only when the same property genuinely appears twice.

We were undercounting pending sales. A listing that went pending more than once in a month counted once. Every pending event now counts.

New construction was missing from Northwest Indiana. We counted new construction everywhere in Indiana except the Northwest Indiana REALTORS Association area, which covers Jasper, Lake, Newton, Porter, Pulaski and Starke counties, along with LaPorte. New construction is now counted the same way statewide.

We changed our monthly freeze date and left a break in the series. Until 2023 we stopped counting a month's sales on the 12th business day of the following month. We moved that to the 7th calendar day so reports could publish sooner. That was good for timeliness, but it meant older reports had more time to collect sales than newer ones. So instead of holding every year to the same date, we picked the date for each period that captures the same share of sales that the 7th captures today.

Most of what you read did not change

Statewide, the medians are identical. Median sale price is still $270,000, days on market is still 22, and price per square foot is still $157. We recovered about 7% more listings, and those homes sold at similar prices and at a similar pace to the ones we already had. That is why the statewide medians hold steady.

The ten year trend held up too. Statewide sales from 2016 to 2025 read -9.0% on the rebuilt data, against the -9.1% we publish today.

Of Indiana's 92 counties, 55 barely move at all.

Some counties changed a great deal

Union County had been reporting 8 sales over a twelve month period. The real number was 81. Fayette County's median sale price had been reported at $124,950, when it was actually $145,900.

We had been discarding listings based on county lines, and the counties on the edges of association territories lost the most. Six counties shift their median price by 5% or more.

Northwest Indiana is a separate case. Its reported market grows between 12% and 22% because new construction had been left out of those counties entirely. The region did not suddenly gain new homes. We started counting the ones that were already there.

How we checked

We looked at the counties that should not have changed at all. Marion, Hamilton and Allen sit well inside a single association's territory, so the old rules were not deleting anything there. If our new method were disturbing data that was already correct, those counties would move.

They do not. All three change by less than 1% in every year from 2020 through 2026. The counties that gained are the ones on association boundaries, which is where the old rule was deleting listings.

If you have cited these numbers

Figures for the affected counties will not match what you quoted before. That is a small set: the counties on association boundaries, and the seven in Northwest Indiana. Statewide figures, and the counties in the middle of association territory, are effectively unchanged.

We have written up the full detail, including the county by county numbers and every check we ran, in a separate document. Read the full explanation here.

If you have a question about a specific county or figure, get in touch and we will walk through it.