Open three tabs and search "Lebanon NH home prices" this week and you will get three different towns. One tracker puts the median sale price at $620,000. Another puts it at $612,000. A third, using a different kind of estimate entirely, puts the average home value at $457,285. All three numbers are accurate. None of them is measuring quite the same thing, and the gap between them is wide enough to change what house you think you can afford.
That confusion would be a minor annoyance in a normal year. It matters more right now because Lebanon is also in the middle of its biggest building push in a decade. Nearly 2,000 housing units are somewhere in the pipeline across the city, a figure the Planning Department presented to the City Council in March. If you're comparing Lebanon to other Upper Valley towns for a move tied to Dartmouth Health or Dartmouth College, a number that size can read like relief is coming. Mostly, it isn't, and understanding why tells you more about this market than any single median will.
Same City, Four Numbers, Five Months
Here's what the trackers actually showed this year, measured four different ways:
| Metric | What it measures | Figure | Window |
|---|---|---|---|
| Median sale price | Closed single-family sales | $620,000 | March 2026 (9 homes sold) |
| Median sale price | Closed single-family sales | $612,000 | April 2026 (28 homes sold) |
| Median list price | Active asking prices | $479,000 | July 2026 |
| Average home value | Automated valuation index | $457,285 | as of late June 2026 |
The first two rows look like they should agree, and they nearly do, but notice the sample size sitting next to them. Nine sales is not a market, it's a coin flip that happened to land on a few larger homes. Redfin's own count for that March window was just 9 closings, small enough that one waterfront estate or one estate-sale fixer-upper can swing the median by six figures. Movoto's April count of 28 sales is a steadier read, and it lands close to the March figure almost by coincidence.
The bigger gap is between sold price and list price, and between list price and the valuation index. A list price is what a seller hopes for. A sale price is what actually happened. An automated home value estimate is a computer's guess based on comparable sales, tax records, and algorithmic smoothing, and it tends to lag behind a market that's moving fast in either direction. In Lebanon this year, those three measurements disagree by more than $160,000. If you're budgeting off whichever number you saw first, you're budgeting off noise.
What's Actually Under Construction
Meanwhile, the city has been tracking real projects, not estimates. Fifteen developments in various stages of permitting, approval, or construction, adding up to those roughly 1,944 units. The names behind them are specific:
- Marek North, on Mount Support Road near Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, where Hingham, Massachusetts-based Saxon Partners is building 204 units, split between 99 one-bedroom and 105 two-bedroom apartments. It's the second of three planned phases.
- Marek West, an additional 260 units the developer is currently seeking Planning Board approval to build right next door.
- Marek South, a separate phase spanning roughly 239,200 square feet across two four-story buildings.
- Village Market, downtown, where Lebanon-based developer Ledgeworks has been working since 2022 to convert the old market building into a food court with 148 studio apartments above it.
- 22 School Street, the former School Street School, where the city is now working through paperwork to retroactively permit eight units the developer built without approval, plus four more not yet constructed.
- Prospect Hill, a townhouse and single-family detached project on Prospect Street near Lebanon Middle School, continuing a development that was first proposed back in 2005 and stalled through the Great Recession.
- Barrows Street Cottages, a compact workforce housing concept built on city-owned land with state infrastructure and design grants.
- The Crossmod project, Dartmouth Health's own employer-assisted housing effort on a vacant hospital property, built around master-leasing apartments for staff.
That is a genuinely large amount of activity for a city this size, and the Planning Department's own framing was telling: more than half of those nearly 2,000 units are studio and one-bedroom apartments.
The Mismatch Nobody's Pricing In
Here's where the story gets more interesting than "supply is coming." A regional housing analysis completed in August 2025 concluded that Lebanon needs to accommodate roughly 848 new units by 2030, growing to about 1,249 by 2040, with a specific mix in mind: around 820 owner-occupied units and 429 rental units across that longer window. In other words, the region's own planning document expects the bulk of new housing to be homes people buy, not apartments people rent.
What's actually in the ground and moving through approvals right now runs the opposite direction. Marek North, Marek West, and Village Market alone account for more than 600 units, and every one of them is a rental apartment, mostly studios and one- or two-bedrooms, aimed squarely at Dartmouth Health staff and other renters rather than home buyers. The one project on the list that mixes in single-family detached product, Prospect Hill, is also the one that has taken more than twenty years to reach completion and blends its detached homes with townhouses whose ownership structure isn't uniform.
So the near-term pipeline is already bigger than the region's full 2040 target, but it's stacked toward the tenure type the region's own analysis says it needs less of. If you're shopping for a single-family home to buy, the construction cranes around Mount Support Road are mostly building competition for renters, not inventory for you.
Pipeline Isn't a Promise
The other thing worth knowing before you factor any of this into a timeline: these projects move slowly, and some of them don't move at all for years at a stretch. Village Market is the clearest example. The developer has extended its permit deadline twice already, once in 2024 and again in 2025, and the city's own planning staff described the project in March as showing "not a lot of active work." The developer, Ledgeworks' Tim Sidore, put it plainly when asked about the delays:
"Downtown redevelopment is a complex process, and nothing ever moves as quickly as we want."
The company's latest deadline to apply for a building permit on the housing portion was the end of July 2026. That date has already passed as of this writing, and the public record doesn't yet show whether the paperwork was filed. River Park, a mixed-use project in West Lebanon that includes housing, has been in some form of proposal since 2011. Fifteen years is not an outlier timeline in this pipeline. It's closer to the norm for the projects that touch downtown redevelopment or multi-phase land assembly.
What This Means If You're Actually Shopping
None of this means Lebanon is a bad place to buy. It means the two most common assumptions buyers bring into the search, that more construction equals more choices for them personally, and that any single price number they saw online is the market, both need a second look.
If you're comparing Lebanon to Hanover, New London, or towns across the river in Vermont, the honest read is this: rental supply for Dartmouth Health staff and young professionals is expanding meaningfully, which may ease pressure on the rental market over the next two to three years. Owner-occupied single-family supply is not expanding at anywhere near the same pace, and the one project bringing meaningful detached-home inventory has already taken two decades to get this far. Price yourself against actual closed comps in your target neighborhood, not against whichever headline number came up first, and ask any listing agent directly how many comparable homes actually closed in the last 60 to 90 days before you anchor a number in your head.
A few direct questions this raises:
Will all this new construction eventually bring single-family prices down in Lebanon? Not on the timeline most buyers are planning around. The bulk of what's being built is rental apartments serving a different segment of the market. Single-family supply depends on a much smaller set of projects that have historically taken years longer than planned.
Why do different websites show such different prices for the same city? They're measuring different things. A sold-price median reflects closed transactions, a list-price median reflects what sellers are currently asking, and an automated valuation index is a computer-generated estimate that can lag real market movement, especially with a small number of monthly sales feeding the calculation.
Should I wait for more inventory before buying in Lebanon? That depends on what you're waiting for. If you need a single-family home, the pipeline described here isn't likely to change your options meaningfully in the near term. If you're comparing rental costs while you decide, the apartment supply coming online may be worth tracking.
If you're weighing Lebanon against another Upper Valley town, or trying to figure out what a specific price range actually buys right now, that's a conversation better had with someone who's watching these permits and closings week to week, not a spreadsheet. Andy Clouse works this market daily and can walk you through what's real, what's still on paper, and what that means for your specific search. Let's Connect.
