Union County Buyers Are Pulling Back Just as the Shelves Fill Up

Union County's spring selling season told two different stories depending on which month you looked at. April brought a burst of activity. May brought a pullback. And underneath both, the supply of homes for sale kept climbing every single month this year.

For institutional buyers tracking distressed inventory and servicers managing default portfolios, that combination, rising supply paired with cooling demand, is the signal worth watching going into summer.

The County Numbers

Union County buyers signed contracts on 538 homes in April, the strongest month of the year so far. May slipped to 450 contracts, an 11 percent drop from April. That kind of step back after a strong month is not unusual, but it lines up with a broader statewide pattern. New Jersey's contract activity was also softer in May after a solid April.

What stands out more than the month-to-month swing is what has been happening to the number of homes sitting unsold. Union County started the year with 408 homes on the market. By May, that number had climbed to 618, an increase of more than 51 percent in just five months. Every single month this year has added more unsold homes than the month before.

Put another way, at the current pace of sales it would take about one and a half to two months to sell through everything currently on the market countywide. That is still a fast-moving market by historical standards. But the trend line matters more than the snapshot, and the trend line is moving in the direction of more choice for buyers and more competition among sellers.

Where Demand Is Holding and Where It Is Not

The county's buyer-to-seller ratio, which compares the number of buyers contracting to purchase against the number of sellers with a home still on the market, sat at 61 buyers for every 100 sellers in May. A year ago, in May 2025, that same ratio was 67 to 100. The market has cooled slightly on a year over year basis, even though it is not in any danger of flipping to a buyer's market outright.

That countywide number hides a lot of variation block by block. Some Union County towns are still moving through inventory at a brisk clip. Cranford Township, for example, would clear its entire current inventory in well under a month at the May pace of sales. Garwood Borough, Fanwood Borough, Westfield Town, and Scotch Plains Township are all in a similar position, each one able to absorb its unsold inventory in roughly a month or less.

On the other end, Plainfield City and Linden City are each sitting at supply levels of well over three months, meaning homes are taking noticeably longer to find a buyer there than in the tighter towns just a few miles away. Elizabeth City and Rahway City are also running looser than the county average. From what I'm seeing on the ground, it's less of an east versus west story and more of a municipality-by-municipality market. Communities such as Cranford, Westfield, Scotch Plains, Fanwood, and Garwood continue to attract strong owner-occupant demand because of schools, commuter access, and limited inventory. In contrast, cities like Plainfield, Linden, Elizabeth, and Rahway generally have a larger housing supply, a broader mix of property types, and more price-sensitive buyers. Those markets are still active, but buyers are taking more time to make decisions and are less willing to overlook deferred maintenance or aggressive pricing. For REO and distressed assets, that means pricing strategy and property condition have become even more important than they were a year ago.