Napa County Real Estate, Fall 2026: What Is Selling, What Is Not, and Why Sonoma Is Not Having the Same Year

By Siamak Kalhor, Realtor (CA DRE #00908799), and Bobak Kalhor, President and Broker of Record (CA DRE #01198998), K2 Investment, Inc. Published October 21, 2026. Data through September 30, 2026.

Napa County real estate has cooled in a way that is easy to miss if you only look at the median price, and Sonoma has not. As of fall 2026, Napa’s median price per square foot is about 10 percent below its 2024 peak, the county carries 6.9 months of inventory, and roughly one in three listings is coming off the market unsold.

We pulled every residential and land listing in Napa County and Sonoma County from the BAREIS MLS for the three years ending September 30, 2026, and compared them. This piece walks through what the data shows and what it means if you own, are thinking of selling, or are looking to buy in the valley.

The headline: Napa is softer than the median price suggests

The number everyone quotes is the median sale price, and on that measure Napa looks fine. The California Association of Realtors put Napa’s September 2026 median at $918,000, up 2 percent from a year earlier. But the median price moves with the mix of what sells. When fewer entry-level homes trade and a handful of large estates close, the median rises while the market underneath it is getting weaker.

Price per square foot strips most of that out, and it tells a different story. Napa’s median price per foot on closed sales peaked at about $607 in the second quarter of 2024. In the third quarter of 2026 it was $548, down roughly 10 percent. Sonoma, over the same three years, moved within a narrow band and finished the period slightly above where it started.

Days on market tells the same story from the other side. Napa homes that sold in the spring of 2024 typically found a buyer in about a month. Over the winter of 2025 to 2026 the median stretched to 68 and 69 days, and it has settled back only to the high 40s. Sonoma’s seasonal pattern is visible too, but the swings are smaller and the recovery each spring is stronger.

Sellers have been adjusting. Across the three years, about a third of Napa homes that eventually sold had at least one price reduction before closing, and that share rose each year, from 30 percent in the year ending September 2024 to 38 percent in the year ending September 2026. Homes closed at a median of about 96 percent of their original asking price in the most recent year, against 98 percent two years earlier.

What is not selling

This is the number we think matters most, and it is the one no county report publishes. Over the three years, 2,883 Napa residential listings closed and about 1,280 were withdrawn, canceled, or expired without a sale. The share of listings that actually closed fell from 74 percent in the first year to 65 percent in the year just ended. Put differently, by the fall of 2026 roughly one in three Napa listings was coming off the market unsold.

The failures are not evenly spread. Under $1 million, 77 percent of listings sold over the period. Between $2 million and $5 million it was 54 percent. Above $5 million it was 33 percent: for every estate that closed, two came off the market. By area, the city of Napa and American Canyon cleared most of what was listed. St. Helena and Calistoga each sold a little over half of theirs, and Angwin sold about four in ten.

Inventory: nearly seven months, and far more at the top

On October 21, 2026 there were 571 active residential listings in Napa County. Against the roughly 83 closings a month the county has averaged over the past year, that is about 6.9 months of supply. The statewide figure C.A.R. reported for September was 3.7 months. Six months is the conventional line between a seller’s market and a buyer’s market, and Napa is on the far side of it.

Under $1 million the market is still reasonably balanced at under five months. From $2 million to $5 million there is more than a year of supply. Above $5 million there are 63 homes listed and 19 sold in the past twelve months, which works out to more than three years of inventory at the current pace. The active listings in that tier have already been on the market for a median of about four months.

Geographically it is the up-valley and hillside markets that are stuck. The city of Napa and American Canyon are at four to five months. St. Helena is at eleven, Yountville fifteen, Calistoga seventeen, Angwin twenty-six. The pattern is consistent: the further a property is from the city of Napa, the larger it is, and the more exposed it is to the wine economy and to fire-zone insurance, the harder it is to sell right now.

Land, ranches, and vineyards

The land market is where the pressures on Napa show up first, and it has been weakening for all three years. Closed land and acreage sales on the MLS fell from 75 in the year ending September 2024 to 56 in the year just ended, and the median time to sell a parcel rose from about four months to nearly five. Over the period, 61 percent of Napa land listings closed; the rest were withdrawn. Parcels that did sell went for a median of about 85 percent of their original asking price, a far bigger discount than houses.

Two things are driving this. The first is the wine business. Napa’s 2025 crop report, released in July 2026, put the winegrape crop at $969 million, down 6 percent, with the average price per ton down 4.5 percent to $6,690. The Napa Valley Grapegrowers’ mapping project, released October 15, 2026, counted 2,944 acres of Napa vineyard removed between October 2025 and August 2026, roughly 7 percent of the county’s bearing acreage in ten months. Tasting room visits and wine club membership have been declining since 2024 according to Silicon Valley Bank’s June 2026 report. When growers are pulling vines rather than planting them, the buyer pool for planted acreage shrinks and sellers of unplanted land lose their best argument.

The second is insurance. The California FAIR Plan, the insurer of last resort that many hillside and rural Napa owners have been forced onto, raised rates an average of 29 percent effective October 15, 2026, and now carries close to 700,000 policies statewide. A Pope Valley homeowner profiled by CBS this month was paying about $10,000 a year before hardening the home and finding a private carrier. Buyers now ask for the insurance quote before the inspection, and a quote in the five figures changes what they will pay. We covered the commercial side of this in our piece on the Los Angeles insurance market; the mechanics in Napa are the same, with wildfire in place of urban fire risk.

One caution on the land numbers. Vineyard and winery transactions in the prime appellations often trade privately, through specialist brokers, and never appear on the MLS. What the MLS shows is the open market for residential acreage, smaller agricultural parcels, and lots. It understates the top of the vineyard market and is a fair read of everything below it.

Why Sonoma is not having the same year

Sonoma County closed about 11,900 residential sales over the same three years, four times Napa’s volume, at a median within a thousand dollars of $800,000 in each of the three years. Price per foot held between $477 and $509 every quarter. Days on market rose over the winter of 2025 to 2026 as they did in Napa, but recovered fully by spring. C.A.R.’s September 2026 report had Sonoma’s median up 10 percent year over year with sales down only 3 percent, against Napa’s sales down 16 percent.

The difference is the housing stock. Seventy percent of Sonoma sales were under $1 million, against 58 percent in Napa, and Sonoma has a far smaller share of the $2 million-plus estate market that is carrying Napa’s inventory. Sonoma also has more of its economy outside the wine business. A buyer priced out of Napa has been able to find a comparable house in Sonoma, Windsor, or Petaluma for less, and that demand has kept Sonoma’s floor firm while Napa’s top end sits. Solano County, the affordability spillover to the south, has a September median of $580,000 and is a different market again.

What this means

If you are selling in Napa, the market has repriced and the listings that are closing are the ones that acknowledged it. A house in the city of Napa priced correctly still sells in about seven weeks. An estate above $2 million priced to 2024 comparables will join the two-thirds that come off the market. Get the insurance quote before you list, fix what it flags, and treat the first thirty days as the only ones that count, because the data says that once a Napa listing passes ninety days, its odds of closing versus coming off the market are close to a coin flip.

If you are buying, the leverage has moved to you in exactly the segments that were hardest to enter three years ago: up-valley homes, acreage, and anything above $2 million. There is more than a year of supply in the $2 million to $5 million range and the sellers who remain have, for the most part, already cut once. Land is the deepest discount, with parcels closing around 85 percent of original asking, but it comes with the most diligence: water, septic, fire-zone insurance, and whether the vineyard economics still support the price. Our piece on why Napa land holds value covers that diligence.

If you are holding, the city of Napa and American Canyon have held up well and we expect them to keep doing so. The hillside and up-valley markets will depend on how quickly the wine industry works through its surplus, and that is a 2027 to 2028 question, not a 2026 one.

K2 Investment has brokered commercial real estate in Downtown Los Angeles since 1995 and has represented owners in Napa for years, including the Longhorn Ridge estates we currently have listed. If you would like a read on a specific property, a specific area, or the insurance picture on a hillside parcel, we are happy to walk through the numbers with you.

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Related reading: Why Napa land holds value · The Napa development blueprint · Why commercial buildings in Los Angeles are getting harder to insure · Napa Valley properties