Cranford is the rare Union County town where the town-wide number tells the truth. Across 191 residential sales, every bedroom tier closed between 102% and 108% of list price, so the 106% town-wide figure is not averaging two opposite markets together. It is describing all of them at once. The two segments that define the township, houses at $757,000 and houses at $868,450, finished at 107% and 108% of list in 24 and 19 days.
Data sourced from the Garden State MLS (GSMLS), August 2025 through July 2026.
The only way to understand a town-wide ratio is to break it apart. Here is Cranford’s year, tier by tier.
| Bedrooms | Sales | Median sale | Avg days | Sale-to-list |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 7 | $335,000 | 16 | 103% |
| 2 | 30 | $437,500 | 21 | 107% |
| 3 | 67 | $757,000 | 24 | 107% |
| 4 | 58 | $868,450 | 19 | 108% |
| 5+ | 29 | $1,225,000 | 25 | 102% |
| Town total | 191 | $785,000 | 22 | 106% |
Houses around $868,450. 58 sales, and the strongest-performing band in the township. Closed at 108% of list in nineteen days. That is the fastest anything moved in Cranford all year, and it is the four-bedroom segment. Just below it, houses at $757,000 made up 67 sales, the single largest group in town, and closed at 107% of list in twenty-four days. Between them these two bands account for 125 of Cranford’s 191 sales. Two-thirds of the market sat between roughly $750,000 and $870,000 and cleared ask by seven to eight points.
Below that, homes at $437,500. 30 sales. Also finished at 107%, in twenty-one days. This matters more than it looks. In several neighbouring towns the entry-level tier is the soft spot, running several points behind the town average. In Cranford it does not. The cheaper end of this market is competing just as hard as the middle, which is a function of what $437,500 buys here: a smaller house near the station and the downtown, in a town people want to walk in.
The one band that gives ground is the top. Homes at $1,225,000 and above. 29 sales. Closed at 102% of list in twenty-five days. Still above asking price, but six points behind the four-bedroom tier and five days slower. Cranford has a large-house market, but it is thinner and more negotiable than the heart of the town, and sellers at that level should not assume the 106% headline applies to them.
Expect to pay over asking almost everywhere. Between $437,500 and $868,450, which is the great majority of what trades here. The market cleared list price by seven or eight points on average, in under twenty-five days. Budget for that. A house listed at $825,000 in the four-bedroom band realistically needs an offer in the high $800,000s to be competitive, and it needs to be written quickly. The one place a buyer has genuine room is above $1.2 million, where 102% and twenty-five days describe a market you can actually negotiate in.
Price to the segment, not to the town. If your house lands in the $750,000 to $870,000 range, list it correctly and the market will take it past your number inside three or four weeks. Overpricing to “leave room” is what turns a nineteen-day sale into a ninety-day one, because this band rewards accurate pricing with competition. Above $1.2 million the arithmetic reverses: the pool is smaller, 102% is the realistic ceiling, and an ambitious list price costs you weeks you will not get back.
Two very different things can happen to a dated house in Cranford under a million dollars, and lot size decides which. On a smaller lot, and a great many Cranford lots are small, laid out when the town was built around the railroad. A home needing significant work gets no premium. It sits, and it sells at or below asking, regardless of what the $868,450 tier did at 108%. The buyer is an owner-occupier doing the arithmetic on a kitchen, a roof and a bathroom, and they subtract every dollar of it from your price.
On half an acre or more, the same house is a completely different asset. It becomes a builder target, and the buyer is paying for land rather than for the house. Owners in that position are routinely priced off tired-house comparables. The agent pulls the three worst recent sales on the street, lands somewhere near them, and the land value is never claimed. In a town where the median is $785,000 and new construction is trading well above it, that gap is not small.
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 Cranford lot carries builder value or only house value. Is the difference between those two outcomes.
Cranford’s $785,000 median sits in the middle of its neighbours, and the sale-to-list ratio is where it holds its own. Springfield, the cheaper alternative one town north, ran a $674,000 median at 103% of list. Around $110,000 less, with noticeably less competition per house. Scotch Plains, immediately west, came in at $942,500 and 105%. Cranford is buying you a smaller price tag than Scotch Plains with a slightly stronger market underneath it.
Above Cranford, the step up is real. Westfield, the adjacent town on the same rail line, posted a $1,352,500 median at 106% of list, and Summit reached $1,608,000 at 108%. Both are competing at a fundamentally different price point. What Cranford offers against them is a walkable downtown and a station of its own at roughly 55 to 60 cents on the Westfield dollar, with the same 106% ratio showing that buyers are not treating it as a consolation prize.
Cranford station sits in the middle of the downtown, on NJ Transit’s Raritan Valley Line. Most Raritan Valley trains run to Newark Penn Station, where riders transfer for New York Penn Station or PATH service to the World Trade Center and midtown. Selected off-peak trains run through to New York without a change. The practical point for buyers is that the station is genuinely walkable from a large share of Cranford’s housing stock, which is not true of every commuter town in this county.
Cranford runs its own K-12 district, Cranford Public Schools, serving the township alone. Students move through neighbourhood elementary schools to two middle schools and then to Cranford High School. There is no regional or send-receive arrangement for the high school. Cranford educates its own students from kindergarten through graduation, which is one of the reasons the township holds its price point against larger neighbours.
Cranford was built around its railroad station and the Rahway River, and both still shape the town. The downtown runs along North and South Avenue on either side of the tracks, dense enough to walk and eat and shop in, which is unusual at this price point in Union County. The river winds through the middle of town past Nomahegan Park and the canoe club, and the streets nearest it carry the town’s oldest and most architecturally interesting housing.
The housing stock is largely interwar: 1920s and 1930s colonials and Tudors, Victorians closest to the station, and post-war capes and split-levels filling in toward the edges of the township. Lots trend small by Union County standards. Union College’s main campus sits in Cranford as well, on Springfield Avenue. The overall character is a compact, walkable, river-and-railroad town rather than a suburb of large lots.
The median sale price in Cranford was $785,000 across 191 residential sales recorded in the Garden State MLS between August 2025 and July 2026. By bedroom count the medians were $437,500 for two bedrooms, $757,000 for three, $868,450 for four, and $1,225,000 for five or more.
A seller’s market, and unusually consistently so. Every bedroom tier in Cranford closed above asking price, from 102% at the top end to 108% in the four-bedroom band, with a town-wide average of 106% of list in twenty-two days. The only segment with meaningful negotiating room is above $1,225,000, where 102% and twenty-five days indicate a market a buyer can actually work in.
Twenty-two days on average across the township. The fastest segment was the $868,450 four-bedroom band at nineteen days; the slowest was the $1,225,000-plus tier at twenty-five days. Note that GSMLS reports average days on market rather than median, so a handful of long-sitting listings pull these figures upward.
Roughly $850,000 to $900,000. The four-bedroom tier, with a $868,450 median, was the strongest and fastest segment in the township at 108% of list in nineteen days across 58 sales. Buyers shopping that band should expect competition and should plan to bid above asking.
Sales above $1,000,000 in Cranford 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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