What $1 million buys in Cincinnati now

WHAT $1 MILLION BUYS IN CINCINNATI NOW
A look at the luxury market for buyers moving up — and moving here
By Roxanne Qualls, Executive Sales Vice President, Sibcy Cline Realtors

There is a version of the housing story you have probably read this summer, and it is mostly discouraging. Sellers outnumbered buyers by 51% in July — 1.46 million sellers against 967,000 buyers, the lowest buyer count Redfin has recorded since it began tracking in 2013. Nearly 80% of American cities now meet Redfin’s definition of a buyer’s market. Mortgage rates have been sitting near a one-year high, with Freddie Mac putting the 30-year fixed average at 6.66% at the end of August.
That is the general market. The upper end is behaving differently, and if you are thinking about moving up from a home you have owned for a decade, or relocating to Cincinnati from a more expensive city, the difference is worth understanding before you start looking.
The top of the market did not get the memo
Nationally, the volume story is unambiguous. The Institute for Luxury Home Marketing’s July report shows North American luxury single-family sales up 9.8% year over year while available inventory fell 2.2%, with attached luxury sales up 15.2% — more buyers competing for fewer homes. On price the answer depends on who is counting, which I will come back to. Redfin put the median U.S. luxury sale price at $1.39 million for the three months ending April 30, up 3.6% year over year against a 1.4% gain for non-luxury homes.
The reason is straightforward. Affluent buyers are frequently paying cash or putting substantial money down, so a rate move that sidelines a first-time buyer barely registers for them. In Greater Cincinnati, more than half of all $2 million-plus purchases last year were cash transactions.
Here that dynamic has produced real numbers. In 2020, 184 homes sold for $1 million or more across the four Southwest Ohio and three Northern Kentucky counties. By 2025 that figure was 582. Sales above $2 million, once roughly one a month, reached 71 closings in 2025 and are on pace to clear 80 this year. Homes at the very top now move faster than homes anywhere else in the market: in Southwest Ohio, median days on market for $2 million-plus properties fell from 47 days in 2019 to two days in 2025.
Cincinnati is one of five metros where this is still possible
Redfin identifies just five major U.S. metropolitan areas where a typical luxury home — defined as the top 5% of the local market — still costs less than $1 million. Cincinnati is one of them, at a median of $952,523, alongside Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh and San Antonio. In 2020 that list had thirty metros on it.
For someone relocating from a coastal market, this is the entire story. One Cincinnati agent described a client moving from a Boston condominium, where the median home price runs around $800,000, who found that a million dollars here bought a house and considerably more space than she had left behind. That gap is not a rounding error. The national median luxury sale price in the same Redfin analysis is $1.37 million; ours is roughly two-thirds of that.
What that price does not tell you is how fast it moves. Of the 152 North American luxury markets the Institute tracked in July, Cincinnati was the fastest one on the board — a median of three days on market, against a median of 24 days across all of them. Homes here sold at 100% of list price, where the North American median was 98.40%. Whatever else is true about this market, it does not leave a buyer much time to think.
I would rather you hear the honest version, though, because it is more useful than the headline. Depending on which definition of “luxury” you use, Cincinnati’s top tier looks either red hot or slightly soft — and both readings are defensible.
Two ways to count, two different answers
The Business Courier’s figures count sales above a fixed dollar line. That line does not move, so as regional prices rose more than 48% between early 2020 and early 2025, homes that once sold for $850,000 crossed into the million-dollar column. The count grows partly because the market grew underneath it.
Redfin measures something else: the top 5% of the metro by value, a threshold that floats upward with the market and therefore cannot inflate the same way. By that measure, Cincinnati luxury prices slipped 1.6% year over year for the three months ending April 30, with closed luxury sales down 22.8% — though that window covers February through April, the thinnest stretch of our calendar, on a base small enough that a dozen closings swings the percentage several points.
The Institute for Luxury Home Marketing’s Cincinnati data, which uses a $550,000 benchmark, sits between the two and is probably the clearest picture. In July the median luxury sale price here was $780,000, up 1% from a year ago. Inventory fell 16%. Sales rose 8%. Homes sold at 100% of list price. But price per square foot slipped from $271 to $265, and days on market went from two to three.
Read those together and you get a market with rising volume, holding prices, and slightly softening value per foot.
That last detail is worth sitting with, because the same split appears nationally. Redfin has luxury prices up 3.6%. The Institute, working from its own city benchmarks, has the North American luxury median sale price slipping from $1,291,527 in July 2025 to $1,272,000 this July, with price per square foot down from $394 to $390. So Cincinnati’s softer per-foot reading is not a local weakness. It is the same pattern the continent is showing — exactly what you would expect where volume is rising and buyers are paying for the right house rather than for square footage.
That is not a market losing steam. It is a market becoming selective.
Selectivity is what you are actually buying into
The Institute’s national analysis makes the same point: limited inventory does not mean every luxury property draws competition. Two homes in the same price range can see dramatically different demand based on condition, location and lifestyle appeal. Buyers at this level are, in one local agent’s words, “more demanding and discriminating” — unwilling to take on older homes needing work, wanting instead something move-in ready and immaculately maintained.
What they are willing to compete for is specific: covered outdoor living space, which one veteran local agent calls the biggest trend he sees; a pool, a home gym, a home office with real technology; large closets and multi-car garages. The phrase I keep hearing is “staycation property” — buyers who work hard, have full lives, and want to come home without needing to leave again.
The consequence for you as a buyer is that the market is uneven in a way averages hide. A well-positioned home in Indian Hill, where six properties above $4 million have sold in the past twelve months, may attract six offers and close above asking in days — one recent 4,000-square-foot listing at $1.99 million sold for $2.75 million, cash, with the buyers waiving appraisal and inspection. A dated home two miles away at a similar price may sit. Averages will not tell you which is which. Neither will an online estimate.
It is also worth knowing that the million-dollar map has widened. Hyde Park and Indian Hill remain the established upper-tier locations, but Anderson Township, Oakley, Mason and the Coldstream area now regularly see sales and new construction above $1 million, and Northern Kentucky’s condominium market at Ovation records seven-figure closings on a near-weekly basis. More entry points is good news for a buyer with a specific budget and a flexible geography.
Where that leaves you
If you are moving up on equity you have built over the last five or six years, you are selling into a market where your own home has likely appreciated substantially, and buying into a tier where cash competition is real but the price of entry remains among the lowest of any major American metro. If you are relocating here, your dollar goes meaningfully further than it did where you came from — and you should plan to move decisively rather than negotiate leisurely, because in the fastest luxury market in North America the right house does not wait for a second showing next weekend.
In either case, the work is not finding out what the market is doing. It is understanding why one house is drawing offers and another is not. That is the question I spend my time on, and it is a better use of an hour than another market forecast.
If you are weighing a move in the next year, I am glad to walk through what your current home is worth and what your budget realistically reaches in the neighborhoods you are considering. There is no obligation and no pressure — just an honest read on the numbers.

SIBCY CLINE REALTORS
Roxanne Qualls
Executive Sales Vice President · GRI · GREEN · LRS · SRS · CLHMS
513-404-7263 · rqualls@sibcycline.com · sibcycline.com/rqualls
Sources: MLS of Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky MLS via Cincinnati Business Courier (August 14, 2026); Cincinnati Business Courier / The Business Journals (August 16, 2026); Institute for Luxury Home Marketing, Cincinnati Luxury Market Report and North American Luxury Market Report, August 2026 editions reporting July 2026 data; Redfin luxury market reports (May 26 and July 8, 2026); Freddie Mac Primary Mortgage Market Survey (August 27, 2026). Days-on-market ranking derived from the 152 single-family markets in the Institute’s North American market table.
This article is provided for general information. Market data reflects the periods noted and is subject to revision. Roxanne Qualls is a licensed REALTOR® and not a tax, legal or financial advisor. Sibcy Cline Realtors is an Equal Housing Opportunity broker.
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