Open five real estate sites in five tabs and search Converse Heights. You will get five different numbers for the same neighborhood, in the same season, and none of them will tell you they disagree.
Redfin says homes here sold for a median of $408,000 in March 2026. Zillow's value index puts the number at $354,277 as of its February 2026 update. Movoto says the median asking price in May 2026 was $537,000. A neighborhood snapshot from Palmetto Park lists an active median of $437,000. Pull a five-listing MLS sample and the average climbs to $592,728. That is a spread of roughly $238,000 across sources describing the same streets in the same year. If you are comparing Converse Heights against another neighborhood before you make an offer, the gap between these numbers is not noise you can average away. It is the most useful fact in the whole search.
The same neighborhood, four different questions
Here is what each of those figures is actually measuring:
| Source | What it tracks | Figure | Window |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sold-price index | Closed sales, trailing month | $408,000 median | March 2026 |
| Smoothed value index | Estimated value, entire housing stock | $354,277 | Through February 2026 |
| Active listing prices | What sellers are asking right now | $537,000 median | May 2026 |
| Active listing snapshot | 18 homes currently for sale | $437,000 median | Point-in-time |
| Small MLS sample | 5 active listings | $592,728 average | Point-in-time |
None of these numbers is wrong. They are answering different questions. A sold-price median tells you what buyers actually paid, often for a home that went under contract six or eight weeks earlier. An asking-price median tells you what sellers currently believe their homes are worth, before any negotiation happens. A value index, the kind that produces that $354,277 figure, is not built from transactions at all. It is a modeled estimate across every home in the neighborhood, listed or not, and it tends to pull toward the center of a wide distribution rather than reflect what is actually changing hands.
Even within a single source, the split shows up. The same page that reports the $408,000 sold median also lists a separate average house price around $342,000, down nearly 19 percent year over year, a different metric measured on a different basis. Median and average are not supposed to match, but a $66,000 gap on the same page is a useful reminder that one number rarely tells the whole story here.
Homes.com shows the same pattern from another angle. As of December 2025, the site listed a median home price of $420,500 alongside an average sale price of $473,182 for the same period. Same neighborhood, same window, more than $50,000 apart, because a handful of large or heavily renovated sales at the top of the range can lift an average without moving the median much at all.
Why the gap doesn't close on its own
The reason these numbers refuse to converge is not a data quality problem. It is that Converse Heights was never one housing market to begin with.
According to a neighborhood range compiled by a local brokerage, homes here run from around 600 square feet up to more than 5,300 square feet, with prices from roughly $159,900 to $1,290,000. That is not a rounding error between two similar houses. That is a 600-square-foot cottage and a 5,300-square-foot estate sharing the same sidewalks, the same tree canopy, and the same neighborhood name on every listing site.
A current listing puts this into concrete terms: an authentic Sears catalog house, built in 1925, offering 2,312 square feet and listed at $420,000. On the same streets, the Charles Pinckney Wofford House, a restored 1909 Neoclassical residence that has been featured in design publications, represents the opposite end of the same neighborhood's range. A separate listing at 445 Connecticut Avenue offers more than 3,800 square feet for $799,000. Another circa-1910 residence, listed on the National Register, offers nearly 3,700 square feet of fully renovated space with a private in-law suite.
Pull five active MLS listings on any given week and you might catch a mix that averages out to $592,728, with sizes ranging from 1,399 to 5,599 square feet and prices from $299,000 to $1,275,000. Pull five listings the following week and the average could land somewhere entirely different, not because the market moved, but because which five houses happened to be active changed.
This is the mechanism. Every site is technically counting correctly. The problem is that "the median Converse Heights home" describes no actual house, because the neighborhood contains at least two distinct housing tiers stacked on the same blocks: modest early-century cottages and bungalows on one end, and fully restored or newly built landmark homes on the other.
What the per-square-foot numbers reveal
If the raw medians disagree, the per-square-foot figures narrow things slightly, and what they show is worth pausing on.
The sold-price data from March 2026 puts the median at $221 per square foot, up 4.5 percent year over year. The active-listing data from May 2026 shows sellers asking $206 per square foot, down 16 percent from the year before and down again from the month before. Buyers are closing at a higher per-square-foot rate than the current crop of sellers is asking for.
That gap can mean one of two things, and both are useful to a buyer or seller trying to price a specific house. Either the active inventory in May skewed toward larger homes, which tend to carry a lower price per square foot even at a high total price, or sellers of larger properties are pricing cautiously into a market where homes are sitting longer. The days-on-market figures point the same direction. Homes that actually closed sold in a range of 44 to 59 days, depending on the source. Homes still sitting on the active market told a slower story: one neighborhood snapshot put current listings at 74 days on average, and the small five-listing MLS sample showed 128 days. A home that sells quickly drops out of the active count fast. A home that lingers stays there, month after month, dragging the active-listing average upward. The homes still waiting tend to be the larger, higher-priced ones.
What this means if you're comparing houses, not neighborhoods
If you are shopping in Converse Heights, or pricing a home to sell here, the median is close to useless on its own. The per-square-foot figure, and specifically the sold-price per-square-foot figure rather than the asking-price one, is a steadier yardstick, because it at least partially controls for the fact that "the median home" here does not exist as a single, comparable thing.
The practical move is to stop asking what the neighborhood median is and start asking what homes of a similar size and vintage have actually closed for. A 1,400-square-foot bungalow and a 3,800-square-foot renovated landmark are not the same market, even though every portal will fold them into the same number. Comparing your target house against the $221 per square foot sold figure, adjusted for its era and condition, will get you closer to a fair number than any median pulled from a site that does not know which tier of the neighborhood it is describing.
Frequently asked questions
If the neighborhood median is around $400,000, does that mean a small cottage will cost close to that? No. That figure reflects the blended result of both tiers of housing selling together. A smaller, original-condition home priced at the neighborhood's per-square-foot rate would land well under the median, while a fully renovated or landmark-scale home would land well above it.
Why do the days-on-market numbers vary so much between sources? Sample size and window. A single month of closed sales, a snapshot of current active listings, and a five-home MLS sample are three different populations, and a slow-moving large home or two can shift a small sample dramatically without reflecting a change in the broader market.
Is Converse Heights currently a buyer's market or a seller's market? Depending on the source, both descriptions have appeared for the same period, which is consistent with a neighborhood where smaller, well-priced homes move quickly while larger or higher-priced listings sit longer. The honest answer depends on which tier of the neighborhood a given house belongs to, not on a single neighborhood-wide label.
If you are trying to figure out what a specific Converse Heights property is actually worth, or what your own home might realistically bring given its size and era, a conversation grounded in local sales, not a blended median, is the place to start. Cindy McPhee-Barrett has spent years reading exactly this kind of data for Spartanburg and Upstate neighborhoods. Reach out to schedule a local market consultation.
