Miami County's Home Sale Values Are Outpacing Assessed Values
Vol. III, No. 267 - Data Suggests Property Values Are Increasing Across the County
Every January, when most of Ohio is shoveling driveways and nursing cold coffee, homes are still being bought and sold and our own County Auditor’s office records those sales — and those numbers tell a story,
This publication looked at home sales in January 2026 and the last few Januaries to see if there are interesting trends about how homes sell in the year’s first month. What this publication found was a story about a market that ran hot, hit a wall, found its footing, and in January 2026 turned in its most active and expensive performance yet. All while sale prices kept pulling further and further away from the county’s own assessment of what homes are worth.
January 2022 was a barn burner — north of 300 residential transactions, with home builders moving new construction at an almost industrial pace across residential neighborhoods across Miami County. January 2023 remained active but clearly smaller, showing some cooling as interest rates began their climb. Then came January 2024 — the smallest data set by a wide margin, with only a handful of documented residential sales. That’s not a market collapse. That’s buyers blinking.
By January 2025, volume roared back with dozens of residential transactions recorded across the county. And then January 2026 arrived — the largest and most geographically diverse dataset in this entire six-year window, with 85 filtered valid residential transactions spanning Troy, Tipp City, Piqua, West Milton, Covington, Pleasant Hill, Bradford, and their surrounding townships. The housing market didn’t quit. It accelerated.
It bears repeating that January is, structurally, the slowest month in Ohio’s real estate calendar. Statewide, January and February together account for less than 15% of annual home sales, while April through June captures 35–40% of the year’s volume. The transactions that do close in the dead of an Ohio winter are made by motivated buyers and sellers at real prices — which makes January a surprisingly useful barometer. And right now, that barometer is rising.
The number that matters for Miami County homeowners and renters alike: sale prices kept going up. In January 2022, new construction homes were selling in the $305,000–$540,000 range. By January 2024, valid residential sales clustered between $179,000 and $557,000. January 2025 pushed the ceiling higher, with resale homes in Tipp City, Piqua, and Troy regularly changing hands between $150,000 and $500,000.
January 2026 reached further still. The dataset’s ceiling now sits near $950,000 — a rural acreage property in Newton Township — and multiple transactions in Tipp City and Troy’s established subdivisions closed between $400,000 and $727,500.
Even entry-level properties reflect the new normal: a home in Piqua’s south side that sold for $174,900, a West Milton bungalow at $162,500, a Covington street-level house at $125,000 — all prices that would have seemed ambitious five years ago. The market keeps asking for more, and buyers keep saying yes.
This is where the data adds a critical second layer to the story. Across most of the six-year window, buyers have paid more than the county’s appraised value — and in January 2026, the gap hit its widest point yet:
The 2023 figures are pulled downward by the new construction pipeline, where builders were closing dozens of homes in some neighborhoods at prices already aligned with — or below — freshly set county appraisals. Strip out that builder-to-buyer dynamic and the pattern in true resale markets becomes unmistakable: the gap between what buyers actually pay and what the auditor’s office says a home is worth has grown from roughly $14,000 in 2021 to $47,500 at the median in January 2026.
Individual 2026 transactions make the scale concrete. A Tipp City home in one of the city’s established neighborhoods closed at $571,000 against a county appraisal of $414,900. A rural property in Bethel Township sold for $727,500 against an appraised value of $595,600. A West Milton ranch sold for $202,000 against $157,000. A mid-range Piqua resale closed at $212,000 against a $140,000 assessment — a 51% premium. Even buyers who paid below the county’s figure — like one Troy resale that closed at $169,000 against a $191,200 appraisal — were exceptions that proved the rule. Approximately 85% of valid January 2026 residential transactions closed above the county’s appraised value.
The gap between sale prices and assessed values is not a bug in Ohio’s system — it’s a structural feature. Under Ohio law, county auditors conduct a full sexennial reappraisal with a triennial update at the midpoint, calibrated from arm’s-length sales data. Miami County’s most recent reappraisal triggered significant “sticker shock” when 2026 tax bills arrived, with many valuations jumping roughly 28%. The Miami County Budget Commission itself urged local governments to roll back millage rates to blunt the impact of rising property taxes.
Yet even after that update, January 2026’s data shows the median appraised value — $184,000 — running $47,500 below what buyers paid at the closing table. This matters because Ohio’s property tax structure ties school district funding, township services, and county revenue directly to assessed valuations. A home that sells for $400,000 on the open market but carries a county appraisal of $250,000 represents a gap that flows through to every taxing district in the county. The January 2026 closings documented in this file are precisely the kind of arm’s-length transactions that Ohio’s Department of Taxation uses to calibrate the next triennial update — meaning this data is not just historical record, it’s the raw material of future tax assessments.
Six Januaries in, the picture in Miami County is clear. Volume has surged back to — and now well beyond — its 2022 peak, with a dataset nearly three times the size of any previous year’s transaction count. Prices are up. The gap between what buyers pay and what the county says homes are worth has never been wider. And that gap, measured one closing at a time across 85 transactions in a single winter month, is the quiet signal that the tax base — despite the 2026 reappraisal — is still running behind the real market and property values, along with those property taxes, could rise in the future.
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