The NC Deal Terms Index → edition of September 12, 2026

What 3,703 Triad home sales actually closed for

The 90 days ending September 8, 2026, in Forsyth, Guilford, Davie and Davidson counties. Pulled from Triad MLS closed-sale records, one sale at a time.

This is the first edition, so there is nothing to compare it against yet. Starting next Saturday there will be, and that is when this gets genuinely useful — not because any single week matters, but because a year of them will show you things nobody in this market can currently see.

More than half of these sellers wrote a check

That is the finding I would want somebody to tell me if I were about to list my house.

Seller concessions showed up in 59.4 percent of Forsyth closings, 57.3 percent in Davidson, 55.6 percent in Davie and 54.8 percent in Guilford. Where a seller paid something, the middle amount was $5,000 in Forsyth, Guilford and Davie, and $6,964 in Davidson.

And it is not spread evenly. In the $250,000 to $400,000 range — which is where most of this market lives — concessions appeared in 72.0 percent of Forsyth closings, 70.0 percent in Davie, 67.6 percent in Davidson and 62.2 percent in Guilford. Above $600,000, that share drops to somewhere in the thirties and forties depending on the county.

If you are pricing a home in that middle range right now, plan for it. Roughly two out of three of your neighbors' sales included seller money. Budgeting as though yours will not is planning against the record.

Ninety-nine percent of list is not the whole story

The middle sale came in at 99.0 percent of asking in Forsyth, 99.1 percent in Guilford, 99.0 percent in Davie and 99.5 percent in Davidson. Read alone, that sounds like almost nobody negotiates.

Here is what that number is actually comparing. It measures the sale price against the asking price on the day the home went under contract — after any price cuts along the way. So it tells you very little about whether the seller got what they originally wanted.

The cuts are counted separately, and they are substantial. In Davidson, 41.2 percent of closed homes were asking less at contract than the day they came on the market. In Forsyth it was 37.3 percent, in Guilford 36.2 percent, in Davie 33.3 percent.

Put the two together and the honest version is this: between a third and forty-one percent of these homes did not sell for what they first asked. They got there by coming down, and then holding firm once somebody was interested.

How long it took

The middle home went under contract in 22 days in Forsyth and Guilford, 19 days in Davie, and 28 days in Davidson.

Something worth noticing in the higher price bands: in Forsyth, homes above $600,000 went under contract in a median of 10.5 days, faster than any other band in any county, and only 21.8 percent of them had cut their price. Guilford's $600,000-plus homes did it in 16 days. Whatever pressure exists in this market right now, it is not sitting on the top of it.

Davidson is running a different race

Davidson took the longest to get under contract, had the largest share of sellers cutting price, and carried the highest median concession. Three signals, all pointing the same way.

Before anybody reads that as a county in trouble, look at the mix. Half of Davidson's closings — 327 out of 651 — landed in the $250,000 to $400,000 range, compared with 36.6 percent of Guilford's. That is precisely the band where seller-paid costs were most common in all four counties, and where price cuts were most common in three of them. A county weighted that heavily toward the busiest, most competitive price range is going to show more of both.

It may be that simple. It may not. One week of data cannot tell you which, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Watch this space for a few weeks and we will know more than we do today.

Roughly one in four listings never sold at all

Of everything that left the market in these 90 days, 24.8 percent in Forsyth and 24.0 percent in Guilford expired or were withdrawn instead of closing. Davidson came in at 19.0 percent, Davie at 17.3 percent.

In Forsyth and Guilford, that is close to one listing in four that ended with a sign coming out of the yard and no closing table. Nobody puts that number in a listing presentation. It belongs in one.

The full numbers

Every median below carries its sample size. Where a price band had fewer than 20 sales in the relevant sub-sample, no median is published for it.

How this was built, and where it falls short

Record-level closed-sale data from Triad MLS, residential property only. Land, multi-family, rentals and commercial are excluded. Distressed sales and comp-only entries are included — ten of Forsyth's 1,322 and twenty-three of Guilford's 1,568 were comp-only. Every figure is a median. Every median carries its sample size.

Sample sizes held up against the same 90 days last year: Forsyth down 6.2 percent, Guilford down 1.2 percent, Davie up 3.2 percent, Davidson up 8.3 percent. Nothing here is built on a thin or unusual quarter.

Two limitations worth stating plainly. Every record in the pull carried a concession value and most were zero, so if that field defaults to zero rather than sitting blank, a sale with no concession looks identical to one where nobody filled in the box — which makes these participation rates a floor rather than a ceiling. And price reductions are derived by comparing original asking price to asking price at contract, so a listing that went up and then came back down would not be caught.

This is a record of what happened, not a forecast of what comes next, and it is not legal or lending advice.

Back to the NC Deal Terms Index — methodology, every past edition, and next Saturday's numbers when they land.

Questions about how any of this applies to your street and your price? Teresa Overcash, Broker-in-Charge, Realty ONE Group Results — teresatedder@gmail.com