Modest New Jersey home listed for $800K just sold for $1.18M after an insane bidding war with 16 offers

The kitchen cabinets are from 1923. There’s no bathroom on the main floor. By any conventional measure, 25 Burnett Terrace in Maplewood, New Jersey should have been a tough sell.

Instead, it became the hottest home in town.

Listed for $800,000 on March 9, the three-bedroom Colonial drew 100 buyer groups across three open houses and 25 private showings before closing on April 16 for $1.18 million — 49% above its asking price, with 16 competing offers on the table.

Mark Slade, the Keller Williams Midtown Direct Realty agent who listed the property alongside his wife MaryCeu Nunes, said he never saw it coming — at least not at that level.

“We were hoping to get mid-to-high $900,000s for it,” Slade told NJ.com. “If we were lucky, maybe break into the million mark.”

They more than broke through.

From the first showing on a Thursday to an accepted offer the following Tuesday, the whole thing was over in five days, he told The Post. Slade credits a combination of aggressive preparation, unconventional marketing and a fortunate lack of competition that week in the $800,000 price band.

Before the first open house, the team repainted the kitchen cabinets, ripped plexiglass off basement windows that had been blocking light, installed new basement flooring and converted part of the lower level into a recreation room. Nunes, who serves as project manager and staging director for the pair, spent 12 hours on-site with a contractor the day before showings began.

The home’s obvious liabilities — no powder room on the main floor, aging cabinetry — were addressed head-on. The team fabricated signage pointing buyers toward a space off the living room as a natural conversion site for a first-floor bathroom, and priced the property to make those objections easier to stomach.

“The price seemed irresistible for a house that had a huge upside,” Slade said. “It’s an opportunity for buyers to expand if they need to without having to move.”

Slade describes the initial pricing as 65% analytical — comps, transaction data, close observation of where listed prices land versus final sales — 20% strategic, aimed at neutralizing known objections before buyers can fixate on them, and 15% luck.

The 15% luck factor played out in real time. That particular week, nothing comparable was available at that price point.

“This was the perfect storm at that week, we weren’t really competing against too much.” Slade told The Post. “This was listed at $800,000, which was less than the average price, which definitely attracted more buyers. It was the sweet spot.”

Of the 16 offers that came in, three finished within roughly $1,000 of one another. The winning buyer separated themselves not on price alone but on terms, agreeing to cover the real estate commission and the mansion tax triggered by sales above $1 million — a combined savings of roughly $18,000 for the seller, who purchased the home in 2001 for $300,000.

Slade said Maplewood is tracking at approximately 13% above asking year-to-date for homes listed in 2026, making 25 Burnett Terrace the market’s outlier by a considerable margin.

He noted last year ended around 12.5% over asking after running as high as 14.5% through the first half.

The broader backdrop against which all of this is playing out is a New Jersey housing market that has separated itself from the rest of the country in a striking way. 

As The Post reported last month, home prices across the state climbed nearly 6% in February compared to the prior year, the sharpest statewide gain in the nation according to property data firm Cotality, against a national average of roughly half a percent. Newark, which is near Maplewood, led all major metros in year-over-year appreciation at 6.7%. Nearly 40% of Garden State homes that month sold above list price, with inventory still running well below pre-pandemic levels.

Slade has watched Maplewood’s transformation up close. He has lived there since 1997, arrived originally because the commute into Manhattan worked for his prior career in fashion. 

When he moved in, the average home price was around $450,000. Today he puts the sweet spot between $800,000 and $1 million — and the ceiling keeps rising. 

Last week, he said, his team listed a property at $1.79 million and within days was looking at offers running 27% over asking, approaching $500,000 above the list price.

“Always, always,” he said when asked whether the pace of change still surprises him. “We’ve seen a dramatic transformation of the town.”