In June 2025, the median home sale in Far Hills came in at $1,102,500. That figure was built on exactly two closings for the entire month. Two months later, in August 2025, the median jumped to $1,888,000, this time drawn from 34 sales. Both numbers were accurate. Neither one tells you what Far Hills homes are actually worth, because in a borough this small, the median isn't tracking the market. It's tracking whichever handful of houses happened to close escrow that month.
If you're comparing Far Hills to Bedminster, Bernardsville, or Peapack-Gladstone using a single median price pulled from a portal, you're not reading a market signal. You're reading a coin flip.
Two Sales, Then Thirty-Four
Far Hills has about 924 residents spread across 4.85 square miles, much of it zoned with large minimum lot sizes that keep the housing stock genuinely scarce. That scarcity is the whole point of living there, and it's also why the math around "median price" breaks down so easily. When a market only produces a couple dozen closings in a typical month, one $600,000 townhome near the village center and one $6 million estate on rolling acreage don't average out to something meaningful. They just take turns deciding what the headline number says.
That's exactly what happened in the middle of 2025. With only two recorded sales in June, the median landed at just over $1.1 million, a figure separately confirmed around the same window by another portal showing a similar $1.1 million median, down roughly 30 percent year over year. Read in isolation, that looks like a market in real decline. Then August arrived, sales volume jumped to 34 for the month, and the median more than doubled to $1.888 million. Nothing about the underlying market shifted that dramatically in eight weeks. What shifted was the sample size.
The Pattern Repeats in 2026
This isn't a one-time quirk from 2025. By spring 2026, the same dynamic showed up again. One month with only two closings produced a borough-level median of roughly $650,000, while the broader 07931 ZIP code snapshot for that same general window sat at $1.4 million, more than double. Depending on which number you happened to see first, you'd walk away with two entirely different impressions of what it costs to buy in Far Hills.
Asking prices tell a similarly unsteady story. In February 2026, one tracking service put the median list price at $2.17 million. By August 2026, that same service showed a median list price of $1.62 million, with price per square foot down 10 percent year over year and days on market falling 14 percent to a median of 65 days. List prices reflect what's currently on the market rather than what's closing, so this isn't a direct apples-to-apples comparison with sold data. But it reinforces the same underlying truth: any single monthly snapshot of Far Hills is more a reflection of which properties happened to be listed or sold than of where values are actually heading.
What Actually Holds Steady
If month-to-month medians are unreliable, what does hold up? Position relative to the surrounding market does. Somerset County's all-home-types median sale price was $554,000 in March 2026, and New Jersey Realtors reported a $667,000 year-to-date median for single-family homes statewide through that same month. Far Hills' ZIP-level median of $1.4 million in March 2026 put it at roughly two and a half times the county figure. That ratio has held even while the borough's own monthly numbers swing wildly, because it's comparing Far Hills to a market with far more transactions to smooth out the noise.
A more useful way to read individual Far Hills listings is by tier rather than by month:
- Entry-level high-end: roughly $1 million to $1.5 million
- Core luxury: roughly $1.5 million to $3 million
- Ultra-luxury: $4 million and up, with current inventory reaching as high as $6.75 million
These bands reflect how the market is actually behaving right now, not an official classification. But they map to real physical differences, lot size, distance from the village center and train station, whether the acreage supports paddocks or a riding ring, rather than to the accident of timing that drives a single month's median up or down.
The Number Under the Number
Even once you're comparing tiers instead of monthly medians, there's a second layer that can make two similarly priced Far Hills properties carry very different actual costs: New Jersey's Farmland Assessment Act. Land that's actively devoted to qualifying agricultural or horticultural use, think hayfields, managed woodland, or working paddocks, can be taxed on its agricultural value rather than its full market value, a difference that can save an owner tens of thousands of dollars a year.
Qualifying isn't automatic. The law generally requires at least five acres devoted to a qualifying use for two consecutive years before the tax year in question, along with minimum gross sales from that use, at least $1,000 a year for the first five acres plus $5 for each additional acre. Applications are filed with the local tax assessor by August 1 of the pretax year, and the New Jersey Division of Taxation lays out the full requirements. Far Hills' own tax assessor's office, listed on the Borough of Far Hills website, handles applications locally.
For a buyer, that means two $1.8 million properties on comparable acreage can carry meaningfully different annual carrying costs depending on whether the land currently holds farmland assessment status, and whether that status would survive a change in use. It's a detail worth raising directly with the seller or their agent before you anchor a comparison to price alone.
How to Actually Read a Far Hills Listing
None of this means Far Hills is unknowable. It means the tools built for high-volume markets don't translate cleanly to a borough this small. A few practical habits help:
Look at quarterly or ZIP-level trends before you trust a single month's median, especially when stacking Far Hills against a neighboring town with far more transactions. Ask directly about farmland assessment status on any large-lot property, and what the exposure would look like if the qualifying use stopped. And weigh the anchors that don't move month to month: the borough's own stop on NJ Transit's Gladstone Branch with service toward New York via Summit, the Somerset Hills Regional School District feeding into Bernards High School, the presence of the USGA's headquarters, and the long-running Far Hills Race Meeting steeplechase hosted annually at Moorland Farm. Those are fixed features of the town. The median isn't.
If you're weighing a Far Hills property against options elsewhere in the Somerset Hills, or trying to figure out what a specific listing's price actually reflects once acreage, zoning, and tax status are factored in, The Power of 2 can walk through the comparison with you directly. Schedule a Consultation and we'll help you read the numbers the way this market actually requires.
