A longer list of completed sales gives a Lafayette seller more properties to examine. The useful work is determining which of those homes resembles the one being sold, and whether recent construction contributed to the total.
What the transaction count provides
Ten of the 95 ranked neighborhoods carried 404 of the map's 1,359 closed sales over the two years it covers, a little under three sales in ten. The top five carried 235.
What that buys an owner in one of them is evidence: a thick, recent, nearby sold record that an appraiser and a buyer's agent can both read. It is not a verdict on the other 85.
The ten rows at the top of the column
By closed sales over the two years: Tecumseh 64, Fair Park 50, Belt RY 43, Vinton Highlands 40, Avalon Bluffs 38, then Raineybrook and Barrington Lakes at 36 each, Vinton Homes 35, Stones Crossing 32 and Benjamin Crossing 30.
Their medians, as the map prints them, run from $185,000 to $475,000. Their built columns start anywhere from the 1850s to 2021. There is no one kind of neighborhood at the top of this column, so the sale count needs additional context.
On this map, the top of the column is a resale record
A new construction closing counts on the map exactly as a resale does, so a neighborhood where a builder is delivering houses can climb the column on the builder's schedule rather than on demand for existing homes. That is worth knowing, and on this map it explains very little of the top.
Across all 95 ranked neighborhoods, 85 of the 1,359 sales were new construction, and they sit in seven rows: Barrington Lakes 21 of its 36 sales, Chesapeake Pointe 20 of 20, Baker Farms 18 of 23, Barrington Woods 13 of 16, Concord Ridge 10 of 27, Raineybrook 2 of 36 and Masons Ridge 1 of 6. Eighty eight of the 95 rows show no new construction at all.
So of the ten busiest rows, one is substantially a builder's record and another carries two new sales. The rest of that volume is houses changing hands in established neighborhoods where there are simply a lot of them. Tecumseh, Fair Park, Belt RY, Vinton Highlands, Avalon Bluffs, Vinton Homes, Stones Crossing and Benjamin Crossing show no new construction over the two years.
Those are resale records start to finish, which is the most useful kind of record to own when you are the one selling.
The bottom of the column is not bad news
Forty five of the 95 ranked neighborhoods closed fewer than ten sales each over the two years, 293 sales between them, and fourteen rows sit at exactly five. The map needs five sales to rank a neighborhood at all, so every one of those rows cleared its bar. A small sample is a small sample and I say so whenever I use one, but a short sold list usually means the neighborhood is small or that people stay.
Neither of those is a flaw in a house.
For scale: the middle row on this map sold ten homes in two years and the average across the 95 is about 14. Ten rows sold 30 or more, 23 sold 20 or more, and 27 sit between ten and 19.
What it actually tells a seller
It tells you how your price will get defended. Where 30 or 40 sales sit behind a listing, the asking price lands inside a thick record, the appraisal has recent matched sales a few streets away, and the conversation with a buyer is about which of those sales your house most resembles. Where there are six, the price has to be built from fewer sales, sometimes from outside the subdivision, and the appraisal carries more judgment.
The house is not worth less. The proof takes more work, and that work belongs in the listing preparation rather than in a surprise during the appraisal period.
The second thing it tells you is where you have company. A neighborhood that closes 40 sales in two years will usually have more than one house for sale at a time, and yours is read against them. The homes for sale the snapshot placed in each neighborhood are on its card on the map, with the date they were read.
A high count may reflect the size of a neighborhood; a low one may reflect fewer properties coming to market. Use the transactions to build relevant comparisons rather than use the total as a verdict on the neighborhood.
What your house is worth, what an appraiser will conclude, and which sales a lender will accept as comparables are not answered by a sales count. Valuation of a specific property is its own piece of work and a lender's appraisal is the appraiser's.
The Lafayette neighborhood map carries every row and column behind this note, the note on how to read that map explains the other columns, and the Lafayette page sets out the city.
Source: 1,359 closed sales from the Indiana Regional MLS (via Redfin), Oct 2024 through Oct 2026, single-family, condo and townhome, as carried on the Lafayette neighborhood map, read October 9, 2026. Neighborhoods need at least five sales to be ranked. New construction counts are the map's own. No individual sale addresses are used.
This note is general. It is not an appraisal. What a specific house would bring depends on that house.