The Far Hills Market Has Split In Two, And The Median Price Can No Longer See It

For most of the last two decades, a buyer researching Far Hills could treat the borough as one thing: a 4.92 square mile pocket of Somerset County zoned in ten acre parcels, with a small number of estates trading each year at prices most of New Jersey never sees. The single median sale price was crude, but it was honest. It described the only market that existed.

That is no longer true. As of April 2026, the borough is running two separate housing markets under one ZIP code, and the gap between them is now wide enough that a headline median tells a buyer almost nothing about what their money will actually buy.

The Shape Of The Market In One Snapshot

Here is what the data looks like when you stop averaging it together.

Zillow's ZHVI for 07931 sat at $1,318,802 as of mid 2026, and Homes.com placed the median at $1,450,000. Both numbers land squarely inside the empty middle of the actual market. They are averages of two things that do not trade against each other.

Where The New Low End Came From

Far Hills historically did not have a low end. The borough's planning framework has long been built around a predominantly ten acre estate zoning pattern, which is exactly why a downsizing buyer who wanted to stay in the community had almost nowhere to go.

That began to change with the borough's Fair Share Housing settlement. The Planning Board approved 105 age restricted for sale townhomes, 25 non age restricted affordable apartments, and 4 age restricted affordable apartments on a 41.54 acre wooded tract east of Route 202, north of Fox Hill Lane. Pulte is the builder. Melillo Equities retains ownership of the apartment component and will lease those units. The project includes an 1,800 square foot on site sewer treatment building, and Pulte's land entitlement lead told the Planning Board the buildout would run three years once approvals were complete.

The for sale carriage home side of that plan is now selling as Kimbolton, marketed by Pulte as an upscale active adult community with carriage homes starting from $1MM, main level owner's suites, and a loft plan for guests. Recent 07931 listings show the pricing bearing out. Coldwell Banker's aggregator has Whitaker Lane and Baldwin Avenue units at Kimbolton in the low to mid $1M range, with a specific Baldwin Avenue home at $1,237,935 and a Sherwood Farm Road condo at $1,051,053. These are the first meaningful sub $1.5M new construction addresses inside the borough in living memory.

For a downsizer already in the Somerset Hills, this is a genuinely new option. For a relocating buyer, it means the sentence "homes in Far Hills start around a million" is now literally true for the first time, but only for a very specific product type that did not exist here two years ago.

What The Estate Tier Is Actually Doing

The upper tier has moved in the opposite direction. Redfin counted 31 luxury listings in Far Hills in June 2026 at a $1.5M median list price, with a 36 day median time on market and only 2 homes sold in the prior month. Movoto's broader Far Hills snapshot for April 2026 put the median list at $2.33M, the median days on market at 127, and the price per square foot at $386, down 11% year over year.

Both readings are correct. Redfin is capturing a mix that includes the new Kimbolton and Sherwood Farm inventory. Movoto is capturing the traditional estate pool. When a market has a bimodal distribution, that is what happens: two credible sources produce medians that are hundreds of thousands of dollars apart because they are looking at different slices.

The estate slice itself is where the friction lives. Current listings tell the story:

• 141 Route 202 at $7,997,000
• 50 Hidden Valley Road at $9,250,000 on 11.29 acres
• 166 Liberty Corner Road at $6,500,000, 16,380 square feet
• 365 Mine Brook Road at $3,895,000 on 23.78 acres
• 175 Route 202, 6,978 square feet
• 2 Wright Lane at $1,595,000 on 10 acres

At 127 days of median inventory time, an estate seller in this borough is running a marketing cycle closer to fine art than to typical suburban resale. That number is not a warning sign about the community. It is a structural feature of a market where each property is genuinely unique, appraisals lean heavily on the physical land, and the pool of qualified buyers for a $5M or $8M house is small enough that timing rarely lines up on the first pass.

The Missing Middle, And Why It Matters At The Offer Table

The interesting number is the one nobody quotes: how few 07931 sales close between $1.3M and $2.0M. Compass and Coldwell Banker's public inventory shows the band mostly represented by land parcels and by properties technically in adjoining townships that share the 07931 ZIP, such as sections of Chester Township, Bedminster Township, Bernards Township, and Peapack Gladstone. A buyer who searches 07931 will see all of these mixed together, then draw conclusions about "Far Hills" that were really drawn from four different municipalities with four different tax rates, school assignments, and zoning maps.

Three practical consequences for a buyer working a shortlist:

1. A comparative market analysis pulled by ZIP will look very different from one pulled by municipality. In Far Hills borough specifically, the true comp pool for any given property is often five to ten transactions a year, not fifty.
2. Estate buyers should assume a longer diligence window than a typical New Jersey purchase. Well and septic evaluations, private road maintenance agreements, easement review, and title work on parcels that have not conveyed in decades all take time. The 127 day list time is one signal; the contract to close timeline is another, and it moves independently.
3. Kimbolton buyers are transacting with a national builder on a builder contract, which is a fundamentally different negotiation than a resale in the same ZIP. Timing, options selections, and mortgage contingencies work on the builder's schedule, not the local resale calendar.

What This Changes If You Are Deciding Between Somerset Hills Towns

For a buyer weighing Far Hills against Bernardsville, Bedminster, or Basking Ridge, the practical read is this. Far Hills is no longer a single price point conversation. It is a choice between a brand new low maintenance carriage home on Route 202 near the Kimbolton entrance, or a private estate on acreage where the property is the point and the house is one component of it. There is very little in between, and the median price you see quoted online is almost always the average of those two experiences rather than a description of either.

That is worth knowing before the first showing, because it determines what a productive Saturday of tours actually looks like. Two Kimbolton walkthroughs and one estate visit are not comparable shopping. They are separate decisions that happen to share a ZIP code, a post office, and the Leonard J. Buck Garden down the road.

FAQ

Is the 07931 median price useful at all? As a general market direction indicator, yes. As a guide to what a specific property should cost, no. The distribution has too many gaps.

Do Kimbolton carriage homes affect estate values in the borough? Not directly. The buyer pools rarely overlap. The larger effect is on how borough level statistics read to outside buyers, which is where confusion tends to start.

How long should an estate seller plan for? A realistic listing plan in this tier is measured in months, not weeks. The 127 day median from April 2026 is a reasonable baseline, with well qualified estate properties often trading faster and highly unique ones taking longer.

If you are trying to place a Far Hills purchase or sale in context, or figure out which side of the split makes sense for your next move, Karen Gray works these submarkets by name, not by ZIP code. Let's connect.