September 3, 2026
Brenna Carswell has lived on the same street in Narberth for a decade, in a rental across from the house she once hoped to buy. She moved to the borough in 2011 from Upper Darby, chasing a spot in the Lower Merion School District for her daughter. In early 2020 she sold her old house with plans to buy again in Narberth. Then the pandemic hit, she was furloughed, and by the time she was ready to try again, the houses on her block had climbed out of reach. Her family has since outgrown the rental, and in the current market, she says, there's nowhere in the borough left to go.
Her story is the human version of a number that should confuse anyone comparing Narberth to the rest of the Main Line: in 2024, the borough's median home sale price fell to $595,000, down sharply from $751,000 the year before. A 20 percent drop in a single year usually signals a market losing steam. In Narberth, it didn't. The borough still posted the highest median home sale price of any municipality in Montgomery County that year. Both things were true at once, and the reason why says more about what you're actually buying in Narberth than the median itself does.
Narberth is half a square mile. It's the only independently governed borough on the Main Line, separated from Lower Merion Township back in 1895, with its own mayor, its own seven-member council, and its own police and fire departments. That independence matters for zoning, which I'll get to, but it also means the annual pool of homes that sell here is tiny. Twenty-seven homes sold in Narberth in May 2026, up from sixteen the year before. That's not a typo. That's the entire monthly sample size a median gets built from.
When a market is that thin, a handful of larger or smaller sales in a given year can swing the median by six figures without any actual change in demand. A borough with thousands of annual transactions absorbs an outlier sale without a ripple. Narberth cannot. So when you see a headline number for the borough, you're not looking at a stable read on buyer appetite the way you would for a larger township. You're looking at whatever mix of homes happened to close that year.
The single-year dip matters less than the decade it sits inside. Between 2014 and 2023, Narberth's median sale price rose from $569,750 to $751,000, a 32 percent increase. Over the same period, Lower Merion Township, which surrounds Narberth on nearly every side, rose just 5 percent. Montgomery County as a whole rose 19 percent.
| Area | 2014–2023 median price change |
|---|---|
| Narberth Borough | +32% |
| Lower Merion Township | +5% |
| Montgomery County (overall) | +19% |
That gap is the real story, and it isn't a story about school quality or restaurant openings. Lower Merion Township shares the same school district. What Narberth has that its neighbors don't is a fixed, unusually small footprint of buildable land, no major thoroughfares cutting through it, and a zoning code that has kept new housing types largely out of the two districts closest to downtown. Scarcity that specific and that permanent shows up in price growth that outpaces everywhere around it, because the supply side simply cannot respond the way a township with more land can.
Here's where it gets relevant to anyone weighing whether to buy into that scarcity today. Narberth's borough council directed its planning commission last August to study how zoning could be used to expand housing and support the local economy. By February 2026, the commission returned with specific recommendations targeting two districts: the 4A district, the higher-density residential ring around the Haverford Avenue downtown core, and the 5B district, the commercial corridor along Montgomery Avenue.
The proposals would let developers build apartments, cottages, and rowhomes by-right in the 4A district, meaning without the conditional-use hearing currently required. They'd offer extra height, up to four stories within the existing 45-foot limit, for buildings that include affordable units. They'd also reduce minimum parking requirements and allow ground-floor apartments along Montgomery Avenue.
Separately, and this is the detail people conflate most often, the borough is also working through a recodification of its entire zoning code, the first major reorganization since Narberth adopted its form-based code in 2016, making it the first municipality in Montgomery County to do so. The recodification itself is described by the borough as policy neutral. It reorganizes the code by building type rather than changing what's allowed. The borough's own zoning page had adoption of that recodification calendared for a council vote in mid-July 2026. The substantive rezoning debate over 4A and 5B is a separate fight, and as of this summer's reporting, it remains unresolved.
Fred Bush, president of the borough council, framed the stakes plainly in coverage of the debate:
"It's very difficult for people who come in here, who are renting or who are looking to move in, young families, to find a place to stay."
Not everyone in Narberth agrees the fix is worth the trade. Margot and Jason Deitz, who live near the Montgomery Avenue corridor where changes are proposed, have described the rezoning push as confusing and see it complicating an already difficult parking situation while shifting the balance of the borough toward renter-occupied units. Others worry that four-story buildings, even with a height bonus tied to affordable units, would change a downtown that currently reads as a small commercial strip within walking distance of nearly every house in the borough.
Proponents counter that more housing near downtown means a larger customer base for existing shops, a broader tax base to fund borough services, and a chance to preserve some of the economic range that let families like Carswell's move in a decade ago. Scott France, executive director of the Montgomery County Planning Commission, which consults on the borough's land-use decisions, has pointed to the same walkability and transit access that made Narberth affordable a generation ago as the exact quality now pricing people out.
If you buy in Narberth today, you're buying into the version of scarcity that produced 32 percent growth while neighboring townships moved a fraction of that. That scarcity is a known, priced-in quantity. What isn't known yet is whether the borough will loosen the rules that created it. A rezoning that adds apartments, cottages, and rowhomes to the ring around downtown wouldn't touch the borough's lower-density 3a districts of larger single-family lots, but it would change the mix of housing near the center of town, which is exactly where the walkability premium currently concentrates.
None of this tells you whether prices go up or down from here. It tells you that the thing driving Narberth's premium is a specific, documented, and currently contested policy choice, not a vague sense that the borough is desirable. That's a different kind of information than a median price on its own, and it's worth understanding before you decide what you're actually paying for.
Does the zoning debate affect single-family homes in Narberth's lower-density areas? The proposed changes target the 4A district around downtown and the 5B commercial corridor along Montgomery Avenue. The borough's lower-density 3a residential districts, made up of larger single-family lots, are not part of the current rezoning proposals.
Is the zoning recodification the same thing as the rezoning debate? No. The recodification is a reorganization of the existing code, described by the borough as policy neutral. The 4A and 5B rezoning proposals are a separate, substantive debate over what can actually be built, and the two have been moving on parallel but distinct timelines through 2026.
Why did Narberth's median price drop in 2024 if the borough is still the most expensive in the county? Because the annual number of homes sold in Narberth is small enough that the mix of properties closing in a given year can shift the median significantly without reflecting a broader change in buyer demand.
If you're comparing Narberth to another Main Line town and want to understand what a specific property's price actually reflects, Jordan Arnold can walk you through the borough's zoning map, its transaction history, and what a given address is really worth in the current market. Request a free home valuation or schedule a confidential consultation to start the conversation.
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