Mountain Lakes is one of the very few towns in this coverage area where the most expensive band is also the busiest one. Of 59 residential sales over the past twelve months, 25 of them. More than four in ten. Were five-bedroom-and-larger homes at a median of $1,620,000, and they closed at 103% of list in 24 days. That is the opposite of the usual pattern, where the top tier is thin and slow. Meanwhile the $1,121,250 band ran a higher ratio, 106%, but took 37 days to get there. Ryan Horvath is an agent with Prominent Properties Sotheby’s International Realty and a former licensed New Jersey general contractor, and in a 59-sale borough of older houses that combination matters more than a headline percentage does.
Data sourced from the Garden State MLS (GSMLS), August 2025 through July 2026.
Fifty-nine sales is a small dataset, so the shape of the table matters more than any single figure in it. Here is what it shows.
| Bedrooms | Sales | Median sale | Avg days | Sale-to-list |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2 | 2 | $649,500 | 17 | 99% |
| 3 | 16 | $862,500 | 29 | 106% |
| 4 | 16 | $1,121,250 | 37 | 106% |
| 5+ | 25 | $1,620,000 | 24 | 103% |
| Town total | 59 | $1,200,000 | 29 | 104% |
The centre of this market is $1,620,000. Twenty-five sales landed there. The largest single band in the borough by a wide margin, and they closed at 103% of list in 24 days, five days faster than the town-wide average. In most towns the estate tier is where listings sit; here it is where the volume is and where the pace is quickest. Anyone pricing a large Mountain Lakes house off an assumption that the top of the market is slow will be pricing off the wrong town.
The most competitive ratio belongs to two bands at once. Houses around $862,500 and houses around $1,121,250 both closed at 106% of list. Three points better than the estate tier, but they got there differently. The $862,500 band averaged 29 days; the $1,121,250 band averaged 37, the slowest in the borough. A 106% ratio earned over five weeks is a different negotiation from a 103% ratio earned in three and a half, and a seller in the $1.1 million range should plan for a longer runway even though the eventual premium is strong.
The two-bedroom row is shown for completeness only. Two transactions cannot describe a segment, and nothing on this page is built on it.
The advice genuinely splits by price band here. If you are shopping around $862,500 or $1,121,250, you are in the two most competitive segments in the borough at 106% of list. Expect to go over asking. But at $1,121,250 you also have the borough’s longest average marketing time working in your favour at 37 days, which means listings in that range are more likely to still be available when you get to them and more likely to entertain a considered offer rather than a same-weekend decision. Above $1,500,000 the dynamic flips: 103% is a milder premium, but 24 days is a quick clock and the inventory is deep enough that hesitating usually costs you a specific house rather than the whole search.
Do not price a large house here as though the upper end is soft. Twenty-five sales at a $1,620,000 median in an average of 24 days is an active, liquid top of the market, and it is the segment most buyers are actually shopping. If your house sits nearer $1,121,250, price it correctly and be patient: that band earned 106% of list, the strongest premium in the borough, but it took 37 days on average to do it. Cutting the price at week four in that range means giving away the premium the data says is available. In a 59-sale market, the right comparable set is small and specific, and general town averages are a poor substitute for it.
Under a million dollars in Mountain Lakes means the $862,500 band, and that is where condition does the most damage or the most good. Two very different things can happen to a dated house at that number, and lot size decides which. On a smaller lot, a home needing significant work gets no premium at all. The buyer is an owner-occupier subtracting the renovation from their own budget, the listing sits, and it sells at or below asking.
On a half acre or more, the same house is a different asset entirely. It becomes a builder target, and the buyer is paying for the land rather than for the house standing on it. That distinction carries real weight in a borough where the band above runs $1,121,250 and the band above that runs $1,620,000. The finished-value arithmetic on a well-sited parcel is not difficult, and builders run it before you do. Owners in that position are routinely priced off tired-house comparables and never find out what the land was worth.
Mountain Lakes also has a great deal of genuinely old housing stock, which makes the condition question harder than usual to answer from photographs. Having a vendor network that will put a real number on the work, and whether a particular lot carries builder value or only house value. Is the difference between those two outcomes, and it is worth establishing before the listing goes live rather than after the offers come in.
Mountain Lakes recorded 59 residential sales over the twelve months covered here. That is a small number, and it means individual transactions move these figures in a way they would not in a town with two hundred sales. A handful of unusual closings can shift a bedroom-tier median by six figures or a sale-to-list ratio by several points. The two-bedroom row above rests on two sales and should not be read as a market signal at all.
Treat every figure on this page as a starting point rather than a conclusion. In a borough this size, pricing is done house by house, off a specific and carefully chosen set of comparables, not off a town-wide average.
At a $1,200,000 median, Mountain Lakes sits toward the upper end of Morris County without reaching the top. Denville, immediately adjacent, is the obvious cheaper alternative at a $700,000 median and 104% of list. The same competitiveness at roughly half the number, and a useful reference point for a buyer weighing whether the Mountain Lakes premium is worth paying. Chester Township runs $925,000 and 102%, a slower and less competitive market at a lower price.
Above Mountain Lakes, Madison is $1,300,000 and 106% of list, and Harding is $1,445,000 but only 101% across 33 sales. A thinner, more negotiable upper-end market. Chatham Township, at $1,620,000 and 105%, sits at the same number as Mountain Lakes’ estate tier but as a town-wide median rather than a top band. The honest read is that Mountain Lakes offers estate-scale housing at a town median well below the towns it competes with on scale, and the 25 sales at $1,620,000 are where that trade actually happens.
Mountain Lakes has its own station on NJ Transit’s Montclair-Boonton Line, running east toward Newark and Hoboken. Exact service patterns and which trains run through to New York vary by time of day and are worth checking against your own schedule before you commit to a commute. Many households here also drive to a nearby station or to Route 46 and I-80 depending on where they are headed.
Mountain Lakes is served by the Mountain Lakes School District, and students attend Mountain Lakes High School. It is a small district serving a small borough, which is part of what a buyer is paying for here.
Mountain Lakes was developed in the early twentieth century by the builder Herbert Hapgood, and the borough is still defined by the stucco-and-timber Hapgood houses he put up. Large, distinctive, and by now well over a century old. The lakes the borough is named for are central to how it lives, with swimming, boating and lakefront recreation organised around them. The overall effect is a small, wooded, architecturally coherent borough where a great deal of the housing stock shares a common vintage and a common set of maintenance realities. For a buyer, the practical consequence is that condition and prior renovation history vary enormously between two houses that look similar from the street.
The median sale price in Mountain Lakes was $1,200,000 across 59 residential sales recorded in the Garden State MLS between August 2025 and July 2026. By bedroom count the medians ran $862,500 for three-bedroom homes, $1,121,250 for four-bedroom, and $1,620,000 for five-bedroom and larger.
A seller’s market, but not uniformly so, and the difference is worth knowing. The $862,500 and $1,121,250 bands both closed at 106% of list, which is firmly seller-favourable. The $1,620,000 estate tier closed at 103%. Still above asking, but with meaningfully more room to negotiate. Buyers have the most leverage on price at the top of this market and the least in the middle of it, which is the reverse of most towns nearby.
Twenty-nine days on average across all 59 sales, but the spread by price band is wide. Homes around $1,620,000 averaged 24 days and homes around $862,500 averaged 29, while the $1,121,250 band averaged 37. Nearly a week and a half longer than the borough as a whole. A four-bedroom listing that is still available at day 30 in Mountain Lakes is behaving normally, not badly.
Because of the housing stock. Twenty-five of the borough’s 59 sales were five-bedroom-and-larger homes at a median of $1,620,000, and they moved faster than anything else on the table at 24 days. In most towns this tier is a handful of transactions a year; in Mountain Lakes it is the main market. It also means that the estate range here is far more liquid, and far better supplied with comparable sales, than the same range in neighbouring towns.
The median sale in Mountain Lakes was $1,200,000, which sits above $1,000,000, so a typical sale here now triggers New Jersey’s Graduated Percent Fee, formerly the “mansion tax.” Since July 10, 2025 it is paid by the seller rather than the buyer, at 1% in this range, charged on the entire sale 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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