A Year Ago, 58% of Mokena Homes Sold Above Asking. Today It's 37% — and New Lenox Went the Other Way
Frankfort, New Lenox and Mokena share borders, share a high school district, and get talked about as one market. They are not one market right now. Over the past twelve months the three towns have moved in three different directions, and in one case two of them essentially swapped places.
Here is the number that started this post. In Mokena, 36.6% of homes sold above asking price in Redfin's most recent three-month window — down 21.9 percentage points from the same period a year earlier. Work that backward and roughly 58.5% of Mokena homes were selling above asking a year ago. It was the bidding-war town of the three.
Meanwhile, in New Lenox, 52.2% of homes sold above asking — up 18.9 points year over year, which puts last year's figure around 33.3%. New Lenox was the quiet one. Now it is the one with the most competition at the offer table.
Frankfort did neither. It drifted down slightly, from about 35.0% above asking to 31.9%, while its median sale price climbed 7.6%.
Three towns you can drive between in fifteen minutes, and a roughly 40-point swing between two of them in a single year.
The full picture, town by town
| Frankfort | New Lenox | Mokena |
Median sale price | $629,607 | $457,271 | $464,692 |
Median price change, year over year | +7.6% | -0.61% | +3.3% |
Median price per square foot | $223 (+6.9%) | $213 (+5.2%) | $204 (+6.5%) |
Median days on market | 50 (was 52) | 42 (was 44) | 43 (was 47) |
Sale-to-list price | 99.0% (-0.59 pt) | 101.2% (+1.1 pt) | 99.7% (-0.45 pt) |
Sold above list price | 31.9% (-3.1 pt) | 52.2% (+18.9 pt) | 36.6% (-21.9 pt) |
Homes with price drops | 17.2% (+3.5 pt) | 20.6% (-3.2 pt) | 18.8% (-4.1 pt) |
Homes sold in the latest month | 90 (+12.6%) | 96 (-15.6%) | 65 (-0.59%) |
Redfin Compete Score | 61 | 68 | 72 |
Three-month window ending | June 2026 | July 2026 | August 2026 |
All figures from Redfin's city housing-market pages, retrieved September 15, 2026. Note the last row: Redfin publishes each town on its own update schedule, so these three windows do not line up perfectly. That matters, and I come back to it in the caveats below.
What "sold above asking" actually measures
It is worth being precise here, because this statistic gets quoted as if it were a pure demand reading. It is not. A home sells above asking when the asking price was below what a buyer would pay. That is partly demand and partly a pricing decision made weeks earlier.
So a rise in the above-asking share can mean buyers got more aggressive. It can also mean sellers and their agents priced more conservatively, and got rewarded. A drop can mean demand cooled, or it can mean sellers reached higher on the list price and buyers held the line closer to it.
The supporting numbers suggest a bit of both in each town:
New Lenox is the only one of the three where the average home is closing over list (101.2%), and its price-drop share fell. That is the profile of a town where list prices are landing at or under what the market will bear.
Mokena is still closing at 99.7% of list and sold homes four days faster than last year, with fewer price drops. That is not a market falling apart. It is a market where the gap between ask and close narrowed from both sides.
Frankfort is the outlier: the highest median, the highest price per square foot, the longest days on market, and the only one of the three where price drops increased. It is also the only one where sales volume rose.
One more wrinkle worth noticing: Redfin's own Compete Score ranks Mokena highest of the three at 72, labeled "very competitive," even though New Lenox has the far higher above-asking share. Two reasonable metrics, two different answers. That is a good argument against pricing a house off any single headline number.
The median is the least useful number on that table
Look at the median price row and the price-per-square-foot row together. Median sale prices moved -0.61%, +3.3% and +7.6%. Price per square foot moved +5.2%, +6.5% and +6.9% — all three within about 1.7 points of each other.
That tells you most of the spread in the median row is a mix effect, not a value effect. A median only reports the middle sale. If New Lenox closed a batch of townhomes and older ranches this summer while Frankfort closed a batch of 3,500-square-foot new construction, the medians will diverge even if every individual house in both towns appreciated at the same rate.
Per square foot, the three towns are doing roughly the same thing: up 5% to 7% on the year. That is the number a seller should care about, and it is the number that gets lost when someone reads a headline that says their town's prices "fell."
What that means if you're pricing a house this fall
Your town's median is not your home's value. It is not even close to a starting point if your square footage, age or lot sits away from the middle of the market.
Half the homes in New Lenox are closing over asking right now, but the average home still sits 42 days on the market. Fast and above asking are not the same thing, and neither is guaranteed.
Frankfort's rising price-drop share is the clearest signal on the board. In a town where the average sale closes 1% under list, the first price is doing more work than it is in New Lenox.
Listings that need a price cut almost always take longer and net less than listings that were priced right on day one. The first two weeks are the ones that count.
The thing that happened yesterday, and nobody sent you a reminder
September 14, 2026 was the deadline to file a 2026 assessment complaint with the Will County Board of Review. It closed yesterday. Assessment notices for this cycle were published August 12 and 13, and Illinois gives you 30 calendar days from the notice date.
This matters more than most homeowners realize, and here is the part that connects directly to everything above.
Under Illinois law, your township assessor set your 2026 market value using valid sales from 2023, 2024 and 2025. That estimated market value is then divided by three to reach your assessment — Illinois residential property outside Cook County is assessed at 33⅓% of market value — and the Supervisor of Assessments may apply an equalization factor on top of that to reach your equalized assessed value.
In other words: the number that will drive your 2027 tax bill was built entirely out of sales that closed before this year started. None of the 2026 activity in this article is in it. Illinois runs its property tax cycle over two years — a 2026 assessment gets billed in 2027 — so there is always a lag, but it is easy to forget how long the rearview mirror actually is.
If you missed the window, here is what is still available
If you did file and you don't like the Board's decision, you have 30 calendar days from the written decision to appeal to the Illinois Property Tax Appeal Board.
Call your township assessor anyway. Frankfort Township and New Lenox Township both handle informal questions, and errors in the physical record — wrong square footage, a bathroom you don't have, a garage that was never built — can often be corrected outside the formal complaint process.
Pull your property record card. It lives at your township assessor's office and lists the characteristics they used. It is free to look at, and it is where most successful appeals start.
Put next August on the calendar. Notices publish in mid-August, the clock is 30 days, and missing it forfeits your right to file at the state level for that year. Will County takes complaints electronically at borcomplaints.willcountysoa.com.
2027 is the big one. Illinois requires a general reassessment of all property every four years outside Cook County. The last one was 2023, which makes 2027 the next quadrennial — the year every parcel gets revalued rather than trended. If you plan to appeal once this decade, that is the year to be paying attention.
The four grounds Will County accepts are worth memorizing: a recent purchase where the assessment exceeds 33.33% of what you paid; comparable sales; assessment equity against similar nearby homes; and recent construction where the assessment exceeds 33.33% of the build cost. If you bought in the last year, the first one is often the strongest case you will ever have, and it is the one people most often fail to use.
The rate backdrop, because it explains some of the volatility
Freddie Mac's weekly survey put the 30-year fixed at 6.76% on September 10, 2026, up from 6.71% the week before. A year ago at the same point it averaged 6.35%. The 15-year averaged 6.09%.
Rates are higher than they were a year ago, not lower. That is the single cleanest explanation for why above-asking shares are jumping around by 20 points from town to town: when borrowing costs rise, buyers get more sensitive to the last $15,000 of price, and whether a house sells above or below its ask starts to hinge more on where the seller started than on how many people walked through it.
Where I could be reading this wrong
A few honest limits on everything above:
The three windows don't match. Frankfort's data ends in June, New Lenox's in July, Mokena's in August. Comparing them side by side is useful, but it is not a perfectly clean comparison, and some of the spread could be seasonal rather than structural.
The samples are small. These towns closed 65 to 96 homes in the months shown. At that size, a handful of unusual sales can move a percentage meaningfully. A 20-point swing in one year is striking; it is not the same as a 20-point swing in a market closing thousands of homes a month.
The figures blend property types. Single-family homes, townhomes and condos are mixed together in each town's numbers, and the three towns have different mixes of each.
None of this is a verdict on any town. These are transaction statistics, not a ranking. A slower above-asking share does not make a community a worse place to live, and a faster one does not make it a better one. What sells above asking in a given quarter is a function of pricing, inventory and financing — nothing more.
A town median tells you nothing about a specific house. Your address, your school boundary, your lot, your condition and your finish level will move your number far more than which of these three villages you happen to live in.
One local note for buyers comparing the three
The school boundaries in this corner of Will County do not follow the village lines. Lincoln-Way Community High School District 210 covers New Lenox, Frankfort, Mokena and Manhattan plus slices of Tinley Park, Orland Park and Homer Glen, and it draws from five separate elementary districts — Frankfort 157-C, Manhattan 114, Mokena 159, New Lenox 122 and Summit Hill 161. Two houses on the same street can feed different elementary districts and different high schools.
Don't take a listing portal's word for it. I'll verify the actual attendance boundary for any specific address before you write an offer, and you can confirm it directly with the district registrar.
For sellers: full service, and a listing commission of 1.25%
If you're thinking about selling in Frankfort, New Lenox or Mokena, here is the part that costs you real money and almost nobody puts in writing.
My listing-side commission is 1.25%. Commissions are always negotiable and vary by brokerage, but a listing side of around 2.5% is common in this market. On the current median sale price in each of these three towns, that difference looks like this:
Town | Median sale price | Listing side at 1.25% | Listing side at 2.5% | Difference |
Frankfort | $629,607 | $7,870 | $15,740 | $7,870 |
New Lenox | $457,271 | $5,716 | $11,432 | $5,716 |
Mokena | $464,692 | $5,809 | $11,617 | $5,808 |
That is money that stays in your pocket at closing. On a Frankfort home at the median, it is nearly eight thousand dollars.
The obvious question is what gets cut to make that work. Nothing does. This is full five-star service at a lower rate, not a discount version of a listing:
Professional photography
3D Matterport virtual tour
Full online marketing across the MLS and every major portal
Pricing built from real comparable sales in your subdivision, not a portal estimate
Showing coordination, feedback, and negotiation from offer through closing
Attorney review, inspection and appraisal handled start to finish
Two more things I put in every listing agreement:
The Zero Commission Clause. If you find your own buyer, you pay me no commission at all. Not a reduced rate — nothing.
Cancel anytime. No lock-in. If you aren't happy with how I'm handling your sale, you're free to walk away.
Twenty-five years in this business, over $100 million in closed sales, and a ranking in the top 5% of the Chicago Association of REALTORS®. I don't think you should have to choose between a full-service listing and a fair commission.
And yes — the entire Chicagoland area
The Lincoln-Way corridor is a market I know well, but it is not the only one I work. The Rosenberg Group handles buyers and sellers across all of Chicagoland: the city neighborhoods, the south and southwest suburbs, the western and DuPage suburbs, the north and northwest suburbs, and the collar counties — Will, Cook, DuPage, Lake, Kane and McHenry.
Same 1.25% listing commission. Same Zero Commission Clause. Same cancel-anytime policy. Whether you're selling a townhome in Mokena, a two-flat in the city, or a five-bedroom in Frankfort, it's the same terms and the same service.
Want to know what your home is actually worth right now? Not a portal estimate built on a three-year-old sales average — a real valuation using current comparable sales in your subdivision. It's free, there's no obligation, and I'll tell you honestly if this isn't your moment to sell.
Jason Rosenberg
The Rosenberg Group at Infiniti Properties
312.882.9797
Sources
Redfin, Frankfort IL Housing Market — median sale price, price per square foot, days on market, sale-to-list, above-list share, price drops, Compete Score (three months ending June 2026; retrieved September 15, 2026)
Redfin, New Lenox IL Housing Market — same metrics (three months ending July 2026; retrieved September 15, 2026)
Redfin, Mokena IL Housing Market — same metrics (three months ending August 2026; retrieved September 15, 2026)
Will County Supervisor of Assessments Office, "Guide to Filing a Complaint at the Board of Review," updated June 3, 2026 — 2026 publication dates of August 12 and 13, September 14, 2026 filing deadline, 2023–2025 sales basis, division by three, equalization factor, the four grounds for complaint, PTAB appeal window, electronic filing portal
Frankfort Township Assessor — Will County tax bill schedule (bills mailed in May, installments due June and September) and the two-year Illinois property tax cycle
35 ILCS 200 — four-year general assessment (quadrennial) cycle outside Cook County; 33⅓% level of assessment
Freddie Mac, Primary Mortgage Market Survey, September 10, 2026 — 30-year fixed at 6.76%, up from 6.71%, versus 6.35% a year earlier; 15-year fixed at 6.09%
Lincoln-Way Community High School District 210 — communities served and the five feeder elementary districts
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