Happy Pi Day and Happy St. Patrick’s Day! 🍀

Spring is on the way, and the longer days are already making a difference. Buyers have more time to see homes, and everything feels a little more welcoming this time of year. In Westchester, sellers are already stepping in, with new listings up 20% from last week.

Are you thinking of selling this spring? Try my new Home Sale Profit Calculator to see how much you could walk away with.

Today’s Topics:

How Many New Listings Were Previously Listed?
The Mansion Tax Adjustment Bill
Zillow for Gamers
Mortgage Rates Surge to 7-Month Highs

The Spring Market Starts with a Wave of Relistings

Nearly 45,000 homeowners who pulled their listings last year put their homes back on the market in January, marking the highest January relisting total in a decade of Redfin records. Those relisted homes accounted for a record 3.6% of all properties on the market during the month, highlighting a notable jump in available inventory heading into the spring selling season.

A record 112,788 homes were delisted in December 2025.
More than a third (36.1%) came back with price cuts.

Ralph’s Take

It’s relisting season. Sellers who didn’t get a deal done last summer or fall are starting to get more serious, and it’s showing up in the numbers.

Take a look at Westchester: 11.7% of this week’s new listings were previously listed homes, up from 10.5% last week, with prices ranging from $120,000 to $19.5 million. Of those homes, 44% returned to the market with a price cut, down from 59% last week, while 24% returned at a higher asking price, up from 9%. With snowstorms slowing much of the market last month, more homes are likely to be relisted in the coming weeks, hopefully at more realistic prices.

Westchester Weekly Market Tracker 📈

‘Coming Soon’: 30 ↑+1
New Listings: 247 ↑+42
Price Reductions: 45 ↑+8
Pending Sales: 152 ↑+6
Closed Sales: 109 ↓-24

💰 Find your home’s value here!

_{Property Type: Residential. OneKey MLS, Inc. 3/6/26 - 3/13/26.}

The “Mansion Tax” Debate

In 1989, New York enacted a “mansion tax,” a tax on home sales over $1 million. At that time, the median home price in Westchester County was about $210,000, so a million dollar purchase truly represented a mansion-level property. But since then, real estate values have risen roughly 370%, while the $1 million threshold hasn’t changed. Today, the tax hits many Westchester buyers, since about half of our home sales exceeded that mark last year. Here’s how it works:

Applicable to purchases of $1,000,000 or more.
Equal to 1% of the full purchase price.
It’s a one-time tax paid at closing.

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The proposed “Mansion Tax Adjustment Act”

A stalled bill (Assembly Bill A2626) would raise the threshold to $2 million and then index that $2 million threshold to inflation starting in 2027.

Ralph’s Take

Raising the cutoff to $2M would better restore the original intent: taxing genuinely high-end transactions rather than routine family purchases. Indexing the threshold going forward is the crucial guardrail so today’s “mansion” line doesn’t quietly become tomorrow’s middle-market line again. If the state wants a luxury tax, it should define luxury in real time, not by a number frozen decades ago.

Zillow-craft: House Hunting in Azeroth

Zillow just teamed up with World of Warcraft to create “Zillow for Warcraft” — a microsite where fans can scroll through in-game homes as if they were real-life listings, complete with classic Zillow-style browsing. In other words: “What if fantasy housing had its own MLS?”

This lead me down a marketing rabbit hole at midnight: What if we could spin up a collab for any listing? Here’s a few I created: