Beverly's Median Home Price Is Hiding Two Opposite Markets

A buyer comparing Beverly to Marblehead or Manchester-by-the-Sea usually starts the same way: pull up the citywide median, set it next to a neighboring town's citywide median, and treat the gap as the whole story. That habit works fine in a town with one housing stock and one buyer pool. It falls apart in Beverly, where the citywide number is quietly averaging two neighborhoods that spent the past year moving in opposite directions, for two entirely different reasons.

Over the trailing twelve months, Prides Crossing's median sale price and its price per square foot both fell. Over the same stretch, Montserrat's median sale price jumped sharply, while its price per square foot fell right alongside it. Same city, same window of time, numbers pointing two different ways at once. Neither one means what it looks like on first read, and the reason why is the more useful thing to understand than either figure on its own.

The Trophy-Estate Problem in Prides Crossing

Prides Crossing built its reputation in the late nineteenth century as a retreat for industrial-era wealth, and it still reads that way today. Along Route 127 and Hale Street, the housing stock runs from multi-acre oceanfront manors to Georgian Revivals, shingle-style residences, and converted carriage houses, several with deeded access to the private sands of West Beach. Current asking prices in the neighborhood stretch from around two million dollars to well north of twenty million, which tells you something important before any sale even closes: this is a market of a few dozen transactions a year, not a few hundred.

That thinness is the whole explanation for the drop. When only a handful of estates trade annually, the median doesn't track broad value the way it does in a high-volume market. It tracks whichever subset of homes happened to close that year. A fourteen percent decline doesn't necessarily mean Prides Crossing estates are worth less than they were twelve months ago. It more likely means this year's closed sales included fewer of the very largest deals than last year's did. The price-per-square-foot decline moving in the same direction is worth watching rather than dismissing, but even that figure rests on a small enough sample that one or two closings at the top or bottom of the range can swing it meaningfully. Read a single year of Prides Crossing data as a verdict on value, and you'll draw a conclusion the sample size can't support.

What Montserrat's 44% Jump Actually Means

Montserrat tells a different kind of story, and it starts with the neighborhood's identity rather than its price tag. For years, locals treated Montserrat as barely distinguishable from neighboring Beverly Cove. Betsy Woods, a longtime Beverly real estate agent, has described it as an area that "hasn't been considered an established neighborhood until fairly recently." What changed is the community that grew up around its own train stop: the Montserrat station on Essex Street, part of the MBTA's Newburyport/Rockport Line, sits in Zone 4 with its own parking lot, and it's become the organizing feature for the blocks around it.

Typical single-family homes here are Cape Cods and colonials running roughly 1,100 to over 4,000 square feet, with prices usually landing between the mid-$500,000s and upper-$800,000s. A trailing twelve-month median of $1.08 million sits well above that everyday range, which is the tell. The sales driving that median skew toward the larger or more recently updated end of the stock, not the standard-issue Cape. Meanwhile the price-per-square-foot figure fell nearly twenty percent, which is exactly what you'd expect if bigger homes were doing more of the selling: more square footage spreads the same or even a higher total price across a wider base, pulling the per-square-foot rate down even as the headline median climbs. That's a mix shift, not a repricing.

The demand behind that shift looks durable rather than accidental. Montserrat residents can walk to downtown Beverly's restaurant and brewery corridor, anchored by spots like Atomic Café and Old Planters Brewing Company, and to the newer North Shore Crossing plaza on Brimbal Avenue, where Rosetti Restaurant has already become a neighborhood favorite. Just up the line, Beverly Landing, a 60-residence community built by Cummings Properties, was reported roughly 80 percent sold this year. Buyers keep choosing to plant themselves in this pocket. What's shifted is which homes they're buying once they get there.

Reading Beverly's Citywide Median Correctly

Zoom back out and the citywide number flattens both stories into something that looks unremarkable. Homes.com's August 2026 snapshot put Beverly's citywide median at $730,000, while Zillow's average home value estimate, a different measure, stood at $751,857 as of its late July 2026 update, up 1.9 percent over the prior year. Neither figure gives any hint of the split happening one layer down. If you're cross-shopping Beverly against Marblehead, Swampscott, or Manchester-by-the-Sea using that single line item, you're comparing an average of at least two distinct submarkets folded into one number, and possibly missing a third or fourth pocket entirely.

The practical takeaway for a buyer: figure out which submarket a listing actually belongs to before treating any comp as representative. A three-bedroom colonial two blocks from Montserrat Station is competing in a different game than a shingle-style estate behind a stone wall on Hale Street, even though a portal search will show them under the same city name and the same headline median.

A few questions worth asking before you lean on a Beverly comp:

• How many comparable homes actually traded in this specific pocket over the past year? A thin sample makes the median volatile in either direction.
• Is the price change driven by like-for-like value, or by a shift in what's selling, size, condition, or location within the neighborhood?
• What's within walking distance, not just within city limits? Commuter rail proximity and a walkable downtown corridor changed the story in Montserrat more than any single sale did.

Beverly's overall market has stayed competitive this year, with most homes fielding multiple offers and moving off the market within about three weeks of listing. That backdrop is real and worth knowing. It just isn't the whole picture, and treating it as one is how a buyer ends up surprised when the comp they were counting on turns out to belong to a different neighborhood entirely.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Beverly currently a buyer's market or a seller's market? Citywide, conditions have favored sellers this year, with most homes drawing multiple offers and selling within about three weeks. That competitiveness varies by neighborhood, which is exactly the point above.

Are Prides Crossing home values really falling? The median sale price and price per square foot both declined over the trailing twelve months, but the neighborhood sees only a few dozen transactions a year. A decline of that size is as likely to reflect which estates happened to close as it is to reflect a broad drop in what buyers are willing to pay.

Why did Montserrat's median jump so much if per-square-foot pricing fell? Because the two numbers are measuring different things. The median rose because larger or more updated homes made up more of what sold. Price per square foot fell because that additional square footage diluted the per-foot rate. Read together, they point to a change in what's selling, not a sudden jump in what any given home is worth.

Comparing neighborhoods on the North Shore takes more than a single median line item, especially in a city like Beverly where the submarkets behave so differently from one another. If you're weighing Prides Crossing against Montserrat, or Beverly against a neighboring town entirely, The Agency Marblehead can walk through what the current data means for your specific search. Request a Red-Carpet Listing Consultation to get a read on the market that goes past the headline number.