A home goes “Pending” on the MLS in OC showing 12 days on market. Feels fresh. Feels hot. Must have been priced right.

Here’s the deal, though. That same home was listed at $1.4M back in January, sat through three price drops, got pulled in March, and came back at $1.25M in April with a shiny new DOM of zero. True time on market? Closer to 90 days.

The stat most buyers and sellers watch, Days on Market, has no way to tell you that. It’s a common scenario as of late, so the real “Days on Market” we’re used to, no longer paints the full picture.

If you’re thinking about selling in the next 6 to 18 months, or you’re out writing offers right now, this is the single biggest gap between what the listing page shows and what’s actually happening. There’s a better number most people don’t know exists. Steven Thomas, the Orange County economist behind Reports on Housing, has been tracking it since 2004. It’s called Expected Market Time, and it’s the stat the smartest people in this market actually watch.

The “Fresh Listing” Illusion

Here’s how DOM works, and why it gets gamed. The counter starts the day a home hits the MLS. If the seller pulls the listing and relists, the counter resets to zero. Clean slate. New photos. New strategy. Same house.

This isn’t some rare loophole. Per Steven Thomas’s recent reporting, roughly 41% of OC listings have carried at least one price reduction. A meaningful chunk of those come with a delist-and-relist to wipe the clock. By the time a buyer sees “new listing, 5 days on market,” they may actually be looking at a home that’s been quietly struggling since winter.

Sellers who use DOM comps to price their own home make this mistake constantly. They see a neighbor’s place “sell in 18 days” and price aggressively, not realizing that the neighbor actually took 85 days and two price drops to get there. The comp is misleading. The pricing strategy that follows is too.

Enter Expected Market Time

Expected Market Time, or ETOM, is the metric Steven Thomas built to cut through this noise. Thomas has published the Orange County Housing Report for more than two decades, and his methodology gets quoted across OC Register, major local brokerages, and pretty much every agent in this county who actually reads the data.

Here’s the simple version. ETOM measures how long it would take to sell every active OC listing at the current pace of pending sales. It’s a function of live supply and live demand. Take active inventory, divide by recent pending sales, multiply by 30. That tells you, in days, how long homes at a given price point are actually taking to move right now.

It doesn’t care about relisting games. It doesn’t care about any single home’s listing history. It looks at the whole market at a specific price tier and tells you, at today’s velocity, what reality looks like.

What This Means if You’re Selling in OC Right Now

As of mid-April 2026, per Reports on Housing, OC’s overall Expected Market Time is 75 days, up from 70 just two weeks earlier. Active inventory sits at 3,979 homes, about even with last year but still 45% below the pre-COVID three-year average. Pending sales have started to slip, which is why ETOM keeps climbing.

That countywide 75 hides the real story. ETOM splits hard by price tier, and this is where pricing strategy gets made or broken.

Notice the shape. The sweet spot right now is the $750K to $1M range, which is moving the fastest. Homes under $750K are actually sitting longer, mostly because most of that inventory is condos and attached homes with softer demand. The higher you climb, the slower it gets.

If you own a Huntington Beach home sitting around the current city median of $1.3M, your ETOM tier is telling you something different than DOM comps will. You should be planning for around 59 days of real market exposure, not 18. Price accordingly. Stage accordingly. Set expectations with your agent accordingly.

Overpricing in this market is brutal. Thomas’s data shows the homes selling quickly in OC right now share three things: accurate pricing from day one, desirable location, and sharp presentation. Everything else sits, drops, sits, drops, and eventually either closes at a real discount or gets pulled and relisted with a reset DOM that misleads the next round of sellers.

What This Means if You’re Buying in OC Right Now

Flip the whole thing around and ETOM becomes a negotiating tool.

You’re looking at a home showing 8 days on market. Listing agent is hinting at multiple offers. Pressure feels real. Before you panic-write a clean offer over list, do two things.

First, pull the listing history. Did this home exist at a different price a few months back? Zillow’s price history view, the full MLS history, or a good buyer’s agent can surface this in minutes. If the home quietly flunked the market at $1.5M in February and is back at $1.35M now, that 8-day DOM is a costume.

Second, check ETOM for that price tier. If you’re buying a $1.6M place in OC right now, the market ETOM is 64 days. A listing showing 8 days of DOM is technically fresh, but it’s operating in a tier where homes routinely take two months to move. That’s real room to negotiate. You can write a more measured offer, ask for credits, push on contingencies, and not feel like you’re going to lose it over a few thousand dollars.

Worth watching: the listings that genuinely do move fast at or above asking. Thomas’s research shows roughly 26% of recent OC sales closed above original list price. Those are the truly hot homes, dialed in on pricing, condition, and location. They’re rare, and ETOM helps you tell the difference between “this one is actually a rocket” and “this one just has fresh photos on a tired listing.”

The Takeaway

Use both numbers. Don’t toss DOM, but never trust it alone.

If you’re a seller in OC, ETOM by price tier is how you price to actually sell, not to sit. If you’re a buyer, it’s how you know when urgency is real and when it’s manufactured.

The Sackin-Stone Team tracks ETOM by price tier and by neighborhood every two weeks, straight from Reports on Housing. If you’re thinking about making a move in Huntington Beach, Costa Mesa, Newport, or anywhere across OC in the next year, we’ll pull the real numbers for your specific price range and zip code. No generic printouts. No DOM comps that lie to you.

Send this to a friend who’s been staring at DOM and wondering why the market feels off. They’re watching the wrong number.

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