On April 28, 2025, 302 West Newbury residents stood up at Town Meeting and voted down the town's plan to comply with a state housing law. Two hundred twenty-seven voted the other way. The proposal would have rezoned a 19-acre parcel at 187 Main Street, the former site of Knapp's Greenhouse, to allow multi-family housing as the Massachusetts MBTA Communities Act requires. It lost, and the town went back to the drawing board.
That single vote is the reason West Newbury's home prices look so erratic on paper right now, and it's worth understanding before you start comparing this town to its neighbors.
The Number Three Sources Can't Agree On
Ask three real estate websites for West Newbury's median home price this fall and you'll get three different answers, and they won't be close. Redfin put the median sale price at $830,000 in November 2025, down 11.3% year over year. By May 2026, the same source had it at $1,059,366, up 11.5% year over year. That's a six-month swing of nearly $230,000 in the reported median for the same small town. Movoto's September 2026 figure shows a median asking price of $855,000, down sharply from earlier in the year. Homes.com has published trailing twelve-month figures ranging from $925,000 to $975,000 depending on which page of its own site you land on.
Part of this is comparing different things. Some of these numbers track closed sales. Others track list prices, which measure what sellers are asking rather than what buyers are paying. Some cover a single month, others a rolling year. If you're cross-referencing sites while house hunting, check which one you're actually looking at before you draw a conclusion from it.
But even accounting for that, the underlying noise is real, and it comes from somewhere specific.
Why One Sale Can Move a Town's Median
West Newbury is a town of roughly 4,500 residents with no downtown retail district and very little turnover in its housing stock. When a market is this thin, a handful of transactions can swing the entire reported median.
Public sale records from late July into late August of 2026 show exactly how wide that range can get within a single town in a single month. A home on Main Street sold for $460,000 on July 24. One week later, a property on River Meadow Drive closed at $1,800,000. In between, sales landed at $850,000 on Crane Neck Street, $975,000 on Main Street, $1,025,000 on Meetinghouse Hill Road, and $1,300,000 on Steed Avenue. Six sales, one town, a spread of nearly $1.4 million.
Average that handful of closings and you get a number that changes dramatically depending on which few houses happened to close that month. That's not a market correcting itself. That's a market with too few transactions to produce a stable center of gravity, and it will keep behaving this way as long as the town's housing stock stays exactly as it is: large-lot single-family homes on private wells and septic systems, with nothing smaller or denser entering the pipeline to smooth things out.
The Vote That Explains the Freeze
That's where the April 2025 vote matters. The MBTA Communities Act, a 2020 state law, requires so-called "MBTA Communities" to zone for multi-family housing near existing services. West Newbury qualifies as an "Adjacent Small Town" under the law's guidelines, which means it must designate a district capable of supporting at least 87 housing units. The law doesn't force anyone to build those units. It only requires the town to make them legal somewhere.
West Newbury's Select Board and Planning Board picked the 187 Main Street site and brought it to voters. It failed. Town Manager Angus Jennings told WHAV News afterward that "West Newbury is totally committed to remaining in compliance with the requirement," and the town restarted the process with a new resident-input working group tasked with finding a site voters would actually support. The town's own Interim Compliance Action Plan, approved by the Planning and Select Boards in January 2025, set a target of full compliance by December 31, 2025.
The stakes are financial as well as procedural. Towns that miss the compliance deadline become ineligible for state funding sources including the Local Capital Projects Fund and the MassWorks Infrastructure Program, the latter of which commonly funds exactly the kind of water and sewer infrastructure a town like West Newbury would need if it ever wanted to support denser housing in the first place.
Even the site search itself ran into the town's underlying geography. West Newbury's own planning materials noted that increased housing density makes the most sense along or near Route 113, in the limited areas that already have access to public water. Most of the town runs on private wells and septic systems, which cap how much new construction the land can physically support regardless of what voters decide. The zoning fight and the water capacity limits are pointing at the same conclusion from two different directions: new housing supply in West Newbury is going to be slow no matter what happens next.
A Few Miles Away, a Different Vote
West Newbury and Newbury get confused constantly, and this is one place where the confusion actually matters. Newbury faced the identical state mandate and took a different path. At its Annual Town Meeting on April 30, 2024, Newbury's Planning Board brought its own MBTA Communities overlay proposal to voters. It passed 234 to 80. The Massachusetts Attorney General approved the bylaw and its accompanying district maps on August 19, 2024, and the matter was settled. Newbury's own materials note the town has received more than $1.7 million in state grant funding in recent years, funding that stays protected because the compliance question is closed.
Two adjacent towns, the same law, opposite outcomes within a year of each other. One has a legally established multi-family district on the books, even if nothing has been built there yet. The other is still searching for a site its own residents will approve.
What This Means If You're Comparing the Two Towns
None of this means West Newbury is a bad place to buy, and it doesn't mean Newbury is guaranteed to see new construction break ground soon either. State guidance on the MBTA Communities Act is explicit that the zoning requirement is not a housing production mandate. Passing the bylaw opens a door. It doesn't guarantee anyone walks through it.
What it does mean is that the two towns are on different clocks. Newbury has already cleared its state-mandated zoning hurdle, which removes one layer of uncertainty from its future housing supply, even if actual construction takes years to materialize. West Newbury has not, and until it does, its existing stock of septic-and-well single-family homes on large lots is effectively the entire market. If you're weighing the two towns against each other, that's a real structural difference, not a matter of one having nicer listings than the other.
It also means you shouldn't read West Newbury's swinging median as a signal to time your offer. A number that moves $200,000 in six months because of who happened to sell a house that month isn't telling you the market is heating up or cooling down. It's telling you the sample size is small. The more useful exercise is looking at what specific homes in your price range and location have actually closed for recently, not what the town-wide average says this week.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does the failed vote mean West Newbury can't build any new housing? No. The vote was specifically about the multi-family zoning district required under the MBTA Communities Act. Single-family construction on existing lots continues under the town's regular zoning and is unaffected by this process.
If Newbury passed its zoning district, will new housing actually get built there soon? Not necessarily right away. State guidelines are clear that establishing a compliant zoning district is a legal requirement, not a construction commitment. Newbury has cleared the zoning hurdle, but any actual development still depends on a builder choosing to act on it, and on the same infrastructure questions, water, septic capacity, and site suitability, that shape projects anywhere on the North Shore.
Why do West Newbury's sold prices vary so much from one house to the next? The town's housing stock is genuinely varied, ranging from smaller homes on modest lots to large historic and riverside properties on multiple acres. With relatively few sales each month, that natural variation shows up directly in the reported median rather than getting smoothed out the way it would in a larger market.
If you're weighing West Newbury against Newbury, or trying to make sense of a median price that seems to move every time you check it, I'd rather walk you through the actual comps than let a portal average speak for the town. Reach out to Kevin Fruh and request your complimentary home valuation to see what's really happening on the ground.
