Chester Township’s $1,362,500 tier is the only substantial band in either Chester that sold below asking. 96% of list, and it took an average of 55 days to get there. One step down, the $1,074,500 band closed 60 sales at 104% in 32 days. The town-wide figure of 102% is the arithmetic between those two, and it tells a buyer at $1.4 million the opposite of what is actually happening. Note also that Chester is two separate municipalities: Chester Township recorded 117 sales over the twelve months through July 2026, Chester Borough only 17, and their numbers differ.
Data sourced from the Garden State MLS (GSMLS), August 2025 through July 2026.
Those four figures describe Chester Township, which is the substantive Chester market with 117 of the two municipalities’ 134 sales; Chester Borough is reported separately by GSMLS and recorded a median sale price of $850,000 at 105% of list.
The Township and the Borough report to GSMLS separately, and the Borough’s volume is small enough that its tiers should be read as indications rather than as a market.
| Bedrooms | Sales | Median sale | Avg days | Sale-to-list |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2 | 8 | $607,500 | 18 | 105% |
| 3 | 29 | $825,000 | 21 | 103% |
| 4 | 60 | $1,074,500 | 32 | 104% |
| 5+ | 20 | $1,362,500 | 55 | 96% |
| Township total | 117 | $925,000 | 32 | 102% |
| Bedrooms | Sales | Median sale | Avg days | Sale-to-list |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3 | 6 | $785,000 | 15 | 109% |
| 4 | 7 | $955,000 | 23 | 104% |
| Borough total | 17 | $850,000 | 24 | 105% |
The Borough’s two-bedroom row has been left out deliberately. Four sales at a $59,200 median is a reporting artefact, not a picture of any house anyone lives in, and nothing on this page is built on it. That is why the two rows shown do not add up to the Borough total.
Chester Township’s market is decided at $1,074,500. Sixty sales. More than half of everything that traded in the township. Landed in that band, at 104% of list over 32 days. That is the number to price against and the number to budget against; it is Chester, functionally.
Houses around $825,000, 29 sales, were the quicker part of the market at 103% of list in 21 days, and the $607,500 band closed at 105% in 18 days, though on only eight sales. Read together, everything in Chester Township below about $1.1 million behaved consistently: above asking, inside about a month, no drama.
Then $1,362,500 breaks the pattern. Twenty sales at 96% of list over an average of 55 days. The only band on this page that finished below asking, and nearly two months of marketing time to do it. That is where negotiation actually exists in Chester. A seller who prices a large house off the township’s 102% headline is pricing off a figure that the $1,074,500 tier earned, not one their own tier did.
Chester Borough is a different scale of thing entirely. 17 sales in a year. At $955,000 it closed at 104% over 23 days and at $785,000 at 109% over 15 days, both on single-digit sale counts. Directionally the Borough looks quicker and slightly hotter than the Township, which is consistent with a small supply of walkable village housing, but the sample will not carry more weight than that.
Below about $1.1 million you should expect to pay over asking and to decide within a few weeks. The $825,000 and $1,074,500 bands closed at 103% and 104% over 21 and 32 days respectively; there is no meaningful discount available in either, and the winning offer is usually the clean one rather than the clever one.
Above about $1.3 million the instruction reverses. Twenty sales at $1,362,500 closed at 96% of list after an average of 55 days. Full asking price is not the expectation at that level in Chester, and a house that has been listed six or eight weeks is behaving normally rather than signalling a problem. Take the time the market is giving you: second visits, a proper construction read, and an offer built on what the property needs.
Under $1.1 million, price to the crowd. The bands from $607,500 to $1,074,500 all cleared list, and the risk is asking so much that you never assemble competing buyers in the first place.
Over $1.3 million, price to the transaction. Fifty-five days and 96% of list means the eventual buyer is negotiating, and the list price you choose is the one you will be negotiated down from. An honest number at the outset shortens the marketing period materially at this end of Chester; an aspirational one buys you a price reduction and a longer wait.
Chester’s entry level is the $607,500 and $825,000 bands in the Township, at 105% and 103% of list over eighteen and twenty-one days. Those are respectable numbers, but they describe finished houses, and a dated one at the same address does not automatically inherit them.
Two very different things happen to a home needing significant work, and lot size decides which. On a small lot, it gets no premium: it sits, and it sells at or below asking. On a half acre or more, the same house stops being a house in the buyer’s mind and becomes land. A builder target, priced on what can be put there rather than on what is standing there now. Chester Township is unusual in this corridor in that a large share of its housing sits on lots well past that threshold, which means the builder-value question applies to far more properties here than it does in a gridded borough.
Owners in that position are routinely priced off tired-house comparables and never find out what the land was worth. Ryan Horvath is an agent with Prominent Properties Sotheby’s International Realty and a former licensed New Jersey general contractor. Having a vendor network that will put a real number on the work, and whether a lot carries builder value, is the difference between those two outcomes.
Chester Borough recorded 17 residential sales in the twelve months covered here, and no bedroom tier within it reached eight sales. Chester Township’s two-bedroom tier is eight sales. At those volumes a single unusual transaction moves the median and the sale-to-list ratio noticeably, and a figure that looks like a trend may be one house. The Township’s $1,074,500 band, at 60 sales, is the only tier on this page substantial enough to treat as a reliable read on its own. Everything else here is a starting point for a conversation, and pricing in Chester is properly done house by house against specific comparable sales rather than off a tier average.
The closest genuine comparable is Mendham Township, immediately east, at a $1,350,000 median and 100% of list. More expensive than Chester Township’s $925,000 and, like Chester’s upper tier, a market that settles at asking rather than above it. That is the pattern across western Morris County: large-lot towns price high and negotiate, rather than pricing low and bidding.
Cheaper alternatives sit close by. Washington Township runs a $733,800 median at 103% of list, and Denville a $700,000 median at 104%. Both meaningfully less expensive than Chester Township and both closing above asking, which is to say faster-moving markets at a lower price point. Morris Township, further east and closer to the rail lines, sits at $956,000 and 106%: almost exactly Chester’s price with four more points of competition attached, and it is worth understanding that trade before assuming Chester is the value option.
Chester has no rail station of its own. Commuters to New York drive to stations elsewhere in Morris County or drive the full distance, and this is the western edge of the county. The commute is long by the standards of the towns nearer the Morris & Essex corridor. That trade is a real part of what the Chester price point buys: land and quiet, at the cost of a drive before the train.
Chester Borough and Chester Township share a single K-8 school district serving both municipalities. High school students attend the West Morris Regional High School District, a regional district shared with neighbouring municipalities. As in the Chathams, the shared district means the price difference between the Borough and the Township is not a schools difference. It is land, house size and housing stock.
Chester Borough is the small, historic centre. A compact Main Street of nineteenth-century storefronts, antique dealers and restaurants, walkable end to end. It accounts for a very small share of the housing.
Chester Township surrounds it and is the substance of the market: large parcels, working farmland, wooded frontage and the Black River valley, with Hacklebarney State Park at its southern end. Housing runs from restored older farmhouses to postwar homes to substantial newer construction on acreage, which is exactly why the bedroom tiers here spread so widely in price. A four-bedroom house in Chester Township is not a standard product, and neither is a five-bedroom one.
Chester Township’s median residential sale price was $925,000 across 117 sales, per GSMLS between August 2025 and July 2026. Chester Borough, a separate municipality with only 17 sales in the same period, recorded a median of $850,000.
Both, at different price points. Everything in Chester Township below about $1.1 million closed above asking. 103% to 105% of list in eighteen to thirty-two days, which is a seller’s market. The $1,362,500 tier closed at 96% of list after 55 days, which is a buyer’s market. The town-wide 102% is an average of the two and describes neither.
The average was $1,045,476 against a median of $925,000. Chester Township contains a meaningful number of large properties on acreage, and those sales pull the average upward while leaving the median. The midpoint of all sales. Much closer to what an ordinary house in the township actually costs. The median is the more useful number for a buyer.
They are independent municipalities. The Borough is the small historic village centre and produced 17 sales in the year; the Township surrounds it, covers far more land, and produced 117. The two share a K-8 school district and a regional high school district, so the distinction is one of housing stock and lot size rather than of schools.
Sales above $1,000,000 in Chester trigger New Jersey’s Graduated Percent Fee, formerly the “mansion tax.” Since July 10, 2025 it is paid by the seller rather than the buyer, starting at 1% of the entire sale price and rising with price. Because the rate steps up at fixed thresholds, a sale crossing one by a small margin can cost more than it gains. See the New Jersey mansion tax seller’s guide for the brackets and where the thresholds fall.
Market data derived from Garden State MLS (GSMLS), August 2025 through July 2026. Statistics reflect residential sales and are not a guarantee of future results.
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