July 27, 2026
Episode 251 opens with kickball. Mark's team, Team Siwiec, played their first tournament game and lost 17 to 1. One run. Corey is delighted. Anthony Butera walks in laughing, and the conversation moves quickly from recreational humiliation to something he has spent 14 years watching up close: the Rochester real estate market, and where it is actually headed.
Rochester still ranked sixth among the hottest US housing markets in June. Anthony is quick to point out that any report you read is two months old, and those two months have been some of the most impactful in recent memory. The market is shifting. Not collapsing. Shifting. And the people who are not paying attention to that distinction are the ones getting hurt.
Anthony sets the context fast. By the end of 2026, Rochester will have seen close to a 100% increase in median sales price since before Covid. That run was fueled largely by the 2.75% interest rates of 2020 and 2021, which created a generation of homeowners who feel locked in. They bought at a rate they will never see again. They have three kids in 1,200 square feet. They have been telling themselves they cannot move. Some of them are finally deciding they cannot stay either.
That is why inventory is starting to loosen. Not because the market is cooling in a dramatic way, but because the golden handcuffs are slowly coming off. People are listing. And that is where the disconnect starts.
In the past two weeks, Anthony has been on 12 to 15 listing appointments. On multiple occasions he has told a seller their home is worth $500,000 and watched the fury cross their face. They want $650,000. They say it is very well built. Anthony says that is not going to constitute a $650,000 valuation. The conversation gets uncomfortable.
The problem is not just seller psychology. It is agents feeding it. Some agents are walking into listing appointments and promising ten offers and $100,000 over asking because they want to win the listing. They are making the listing appointment the day of good news instead of the day of honest strategy. Then the house sits. The seller is furious. The agent loses the referral. And the cycle repeats.
Anthony calls it buying a listing. You know the house is worth $500,000. You tell them $575,000 to get the contract signed. Then you spend six months wearing down the seller on price reductions. It was a pre-Covid playbook. It is back. And it is going to hurt the agents running it when the market keeps shifting. He is direct about it: consistency in your strategy in an inconsistent market is dangerous.
Anthony's answer is clear: turnkey homes with great staging and updated mechanics. Photo day is still the most important day of every listing. Buyers are willing to pay emotional value on top of fair market value for a home that looks stunning in photos and shows even better in person. If you want to be the listing where everyone looks back and says they cannot believe what it went for, you have to earn it.
He gives a real example. A house in Fairport listed at $600,000 with one of the nicest kitchens he has seen in years. Multiple offers. Escalation clause. Final price: $753,500. The next highest offer was $750,000. That kind of result still happens. Just not for every house.
He brings up the Upstate Root Girls, a Rochester staging company he told six years ago probably would not make it in this market. He was wrong. They are now so booked that they are telling agents they have no furniture available because it is all in other properties. The market changed, and they changed with it. Kristen and her team do Anthony's mother's Christmas tree every year. He is not exactly objective, but the numbers back him up.
The average age of a first-time homebuyer in the US is now 41 years old. Anthony says that number should alarm everyone. Real estate has historically been the number one catalyst for building wealth. Delaying that first purchase by 15 years does not just affect housing. It delays family planning. It shifts retirement timelines. It changes when people can help their own kids.
He has heard it in social conversations. Couples in their late 20s saying they are going to get married, then save for a house, then start a family. The sequence that used to take five years is now taking ten. And the downstream effects of that shift will not show up in housing data for another decade. He thinks we are going to see a demographic shift where people are having their first kids at 35 or 40. He finds it fascinating and troubling in equal measure.
Congress recently passed legislation theoretically designed to help. Anthony is not impressed. Nothing in the bill will meaningfully increase the supply of homes over the next four to five years. He calls it a hollow bill. Mark and Corey push back on the corporate ownership angle. Anthony's response is blunt: we really have not seen that happening in Rochester. The blanket statement affects the whole state, but the local reality is different.
Anthony now runs offices in Batavia, Williamsville, Lewiston, Orchard Park, Ellicottville, and Jamestown, in addition to Rochester. He has nearly 800 agents across both markets. When Mark and Corey ask him to compare Rochester and Buffalo, he has real data and real opinions.
The similarities are real. Both markets are affordable by national standards. Both have seen strong price appreciation. Both are still seller-leaning even as things shift. But the differences are sharp. Rochester runs on GRB and Premium Mortgage. If a buyer's agent shows up with a pre-approval from anyone else, there is a very good chance the offer gets passed over regardless of price. Buffalo is more open to outside lenders. Rochester's listing agents are also more likely to require cash guarantees on offers. Buffalo agents were slower to adopt that practice and remain more flexible.
For investors, Anthony gives the edge to Buffalo. More investor desirability, easier access via the Thruway, and a governor who has historically directed more infrastructure money toward Buffalo to protect the Bills and the Sabres. Rochester is a destination city. Buffalo is a corridor city. Both are undervalued nationally. But Buffalo has more upside for pure investment returns.
For buyers at $400,000, Rochester still wins. You get more house, better school districts on the east side, and a market that has never gone through a five-year period where median sales price did not increase. Even in Rochester's worst years, prices held.
Anthony grew up on the West Side of Buffalo. He moved to Rochester and noticed the difference immediately. He tells a story about pulling off the road in a snowstorm. In Buffalo, three cars would pull over and push you out. In Rochester, you sit there with your blinkers on and freeze. He is not complaining. He loves Rochester. But he knows where he came from.
Anthony's prediction is a return to the mean. Three and a half to four and a half percent annual price growth. Predictable. Healthy. The double-digit years are over for a long time. He thinks it will take three to five years to fully stabilize, and he does not see Rochester going through the kind of correction that markets like Cape Coral have experienced. Rochester has never had a five-year period of price decline. He does not see that changing.
The sweet spot for interest rates, in his view, is five and a half percent. Low enough to bring buyers back into the market and restore affordability. High enough that we never find ourselves in another 2.75% situation where an entire generation gets locked into their homes. He hopes rates never go that low again. He means it.
He does have one macro concern. He thinks the stock market is overdue for a significant correction, and he worries it will not be a gentle five or ten percent pullback. He fears something cataclysmic. A 20% decline in a few weeks. If that happens fast and hard, the ripple effects on consumer confidence and buyer behavior in real estate will be real. He is watching it.
Anthony's favorite Rochester restaurant is Lucano. He says it is a hidden gem even though it has been around for 25 years. He gets food from there every Friday. His cousin owns it. He is not exactly objective, but he stands by it. He also loves Red, and all of Josh Myles' restaurants. If he could have dinner with anyone from Rochester history, he picks Tom Golisano. He says they probably have more in common than you would think, just a little different in the wealth department.
His favorite place to take someone who has never been to Rochester is Highland Park. He thinks it is underrated. And his answer for what Rochester has that a city its size probably should not: the fast ferry. He was on it. He has never forgotten it. He does not think the vision for that project will ever be fully realized, and that bothers him. He pauses on the question longer than any other in the lightning round. You can tell he actually means it.
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