What makes a home sit on the market? Usually a price built from the wrong town.

The question I get asked first, every time, is what the home is worth. The question underneath it is the one people actually lie awake on. What if the number is wrong, the home sits, and everybody watching can see it sat.

That fear is well placed, and the cause is more boring than people expect. A price gets built from sales that look close enough on a map and are not close enough in fact. Davis County has a clean example of it sitting four miles wide.

I am David Supinger, Principal Broker at David Supinger Real Estate, and I have been selling homes in this county full time since the early nineties. I live in Farmington and Centerville has been one of my most active towns this year, so I have a foot in both halves of this.

Single-family sales, twelve months to 28 September 2026, from the Wasatch Front Regional MLS:

Farmington: 166 sales, median $749,950, median 31 days on market.

Centerville: 98 sales, median $650,000, median 38 days on market.

Centerville sits closer to Salt Lake. It sold for nearly $100,000 less on the median, and took a week longer to do it.

That is not a blip in one price band. It is the middle of each market.

The rule of thumb is not wrong about what it is actually measuring. Land closer to a city does cost more, all else equal.

All else is not equal here.

Farmington has spent years building large new homes west of I-15. Chestnut Farms, built by Symphony Homes, is the clearest example: an entire pocket of homes running $1M and up. Forty-five Farmington sales cleared a million dollars last year, which is 27% of everything that traded there. More than one home in four.

Centerville's housing stock is older and smaller on average. Twelve of its 98 sales cleared a million, about 12%. It had the highest single sale of any town I work, $5,500,000, and very few others near it.

So the median is not telling you that Centerville land is worth less. It is telling you that Centerville has been selling smaller, older houses. Those are different statements and only one of them is about location.

Comparables get pulled by radius. Farmington sales are minutes away from most of Centerville, they look similar on a spreadsheet, and nothing on a map announces that one town has been building $1M homes and the other has not.

An agent who believes the rule of thumb, and most do, prices your Centerville home off a Farmington comparable and overshoots. Overshooting is what makes a home sit, and sitting is what forces the reduction you never needed.

Centerville's 38-day median is the tell. It is the slowest of the three towns I work, which means pricing here has less room for optimism than in Farmington or Kaysville, not more.

This is why a proper Centerville valuation prices against Centerville rather than against the nearest sale. It is also most of what selling your home in Centerville is about.

North Centerville is different, and if you own there the town median almost certainly understates you.

North Centerville and South Farmington are steadily building into each other, and the gap between the two cities is filling in with new construction. 200 East, which is also called Main Street, runs south out of Farmington and keeps the same road under a different name once it crosses the line. The boundary is getting harder to see on the ground every year.

That band carries numbers most people do not associate with Centerville at all. I sold 2136 North 725 West for $1.17M up there.

Comparables from three years ago do not describe what is standing next to you now, which is how a valuation goes wrong in the other direction.

If you are selling in Centerville, ask whoever is pricing your home which town their comparables came from. It is a fair question and the answer tells you a great deal.

If you are buying, the gap is an opportunity rather than a warning. You are not getting the same house cheaper because it is further from the city. You are getting a different house cheaper, closer to the city, and whether that is a bargain depends entirely on what you want. Buying a home in Centerville goes through it properly.

And if you are weighing the two towns against each other, the honest summary is this. Farmington has Station Park, a FrontRunner stop and the canyon, and costs more. Centerville has the big-box strip, the shortest run into Salt Lake, no rail stop, and costs less. Neither is better. They are different, and the median has been quietly telling you so.

Tell me about your home and I will price it against the right town, and show you the reasoning.

Figures throughout are single-family sold listings from the Wasatch Front Regional MLS, Davis County, for the twelve months to 28 September 2026.