A couple I know spent a Saturday afternoon touring two new-construction communities in Farmington, both a few minutes from Route 96, both listed under the same town name, both in the same rough price range on paper. They assumed they were comparing two versions of the same thing. They weren't. One feeds into Canandaigua City schools. The other feeds into Victor Central. Nobody had told them that "Farmington" on a listing sheet doesn't answer the school district question. It just postpones it.
That gap between what the address says and what you're actually buying is the thing worth understanding before you fall for a floor plan.
The town line isn't the school line
Farmington is a single municipality, but it was never carved along one school district's boundary. Kids who live in the Town of Farmington can be zoned into four different districts depending on which side of which road their home sits on: Canandaigua City, Victor Central, Manchester-Shortsville (also called Red Jacket), or Palmyra-Macedon. That's not a quirk of old township lines nobody bothered to fix. It's the current, functioning reality of how the town is districted, and it means two houses a short drive apart can be feeding entirely different school systems, tax rates, and bus routes while sharing a mailing address.
Builders already know this, and they market accordingly. Ryan Homes sells its Farmbrook community, off Meadowbrook Lane, as the lowest-priced new construction in Ontario County, and it leans hard on the Canandaigua City School District as part of that pitch. A few miles away, Gerber Homes' custom-lot community at County Road 8 and Holtz Road makes the opposite sell: town water, easy access to I-90, and placement in what it calls the highly sought-after Victor school district. Same town. Different product. Different story about what the district itself is worth.
What the same town buys you, depending on where you stand
Here's the comparison stripped down to what actually differs:
| Farmbrook (Ryan Homes) | County Road 8 & Holtz Road (Gerber Homes) | |
|---|---|---|
| School district | Canandaigua City | Victor Central |
| Product type | Production homes, set floor plans | Custom homesites, base price plus lot and site work |
| Entry price point | Mid $300s, with recent quick move-ins priced around $337,000 to $360,000 | Not publicly listed as a flat price, priced individually per lot and design |
| Positioning | "Lowest-priced new homes in Ontario County" | "Highly sought-after" district as the lead selling point |
Notice what's actually being sold in each case. Farmbrook's pitch is affordability inside a school district it's happy to name. Gerber's pitch is the district itself, priced separately from everything else, because the district is the product buyers are paying to access. Neither builder is being dishonest. They're pricing two different sub-markets that both happen to sit inside the Farmington town line.
Why the portal stats disagree with each other
If you've already started comparing listing sites, you've probably noticed the numbers don't line up. As of June 2026, Movoto put Farmington's median list price at $416,000, down 9 percent from the prior month, with homes spending a median of just 12 days on market, a 40 percent drop in time-to-contract from a year earlier. Homes.com, looking at trailing 12-month sales rather than list prices, put the median sale price at $311,000, down 9 percent year over year, with homes selling in a median of 18 days. That's a gap of more than $100,000 between two supposedly current numbers for the same town.
Some of that gap is the normal distance between what sellers ask and what buyers pay. But a gap this size, combined with days-on-market figures that don't agree either, is also what you'd expect if the underlying sample includes homes from genuinely different demand pools. A new production home in the Canandaigua district and a custom lot in the Victor district don't compete for the same buyer, don't sell at the same pace, and don't belong in the same average without a footnote. When a portal reports "Farmington's median," it's blending those pools into one number that describes neither of them accurately.
This is the part worth sitting with if you're comparing Farmington to a neighboring suburb using nothing but the headline stat. The stat itself is doing double duty it wasn't built for.
More supply is coming, and the district question isn't settled yet
The town's new-construction pipeline isn't finished. On May 6, 2026, the Farmington Planning Board gave preliminary subdivision and site plan approval, with conditions, to Farmington Meadows, a 65.1-acre project that includes roughly 50 single-family lots alongside rental townhome units and a senior apartment building. That's a meaningful amount of future inventory, and it's still working through approvals rather than sitting finished and move-in ready.
What the plan doesn't resolve, at least not yet, is which school district it feeds. That's worth watching if you're weighing Farmington against Victor, Canandaigua, or another Rochester-area suburb over the next year. A large new development can shift a town's price averages meaningfully once it starts closing, and depending on its district assignment, it could either reinforce the current split or scramble it further.
What to actually ask before you get attached to a listing
Given all that, the practical move for a buyer comparing Farmington to anywhere else is simple: stop treating "Farmington" as the unit of comparison. Treat the school district as the unit of comparison, and ask which one a specific address falls into before you compare it to anything.
A few questions worth asking on any Farmington listing:
- Which school district is this parcel actually zoned for, not which one is nearest on a map
- Is the builder or listing agent naming the district explicitly, the way Farmbrook and Gerber both do, or leaving it vague
- If it's new construction, has the lot been finalized, or is it still moving through town approvals the way Farmington Meadows currently is
- If you're comparing a median price you found online, does that figure come from list prices, sold prices, or a trailing 12-month window, and over what period
None of these questions require special access. The Town of Farmington's planning records are public, and Ontario County publishes school district boundary maps that show exactly where the lines fall, road by road.
A quick note on what this doesn't mean
None of this is a claim that one district is better for your family than another. School quality involves things beyond the scope of a real estate conversation, and Fair Housing guidelines rightly keep steering people toward or away from a neighborhood based on that kind of judgment out of how we do business. What we can say, plainly, is that the district lines are real, the builders already price around them, and the town-wide statistics you'll find on any portal quietly average across them. Knowing that changes how you read a listing. It doesn't tell you which listing to want.
A few questions we hear often
Does the school district actually affect resale value in Farmington? It can, since builders themselves price differently depending on the district, as seen in Farmbrook's affordability pitch against Gerber's district-first pitch. Whether that translates to different long-term appreciation is a separate question worth asking about the specific street, not the town as a whole.
Is Farmington Meadows available to buy yet? Not as of this writing. The Planning Board approved the preliminary subdivision and site plan with conditions on May 6, 2026, which puts it further along than a proposal but earlier than a finished, ready-to-close community.
How do I find out which district a specific Farmington address is zoned for? Ontario County's GIS office publishes school district maps you can check against a specific parcel, and it's a faster, more reliable answer than guessing from the town name alone.
If you're weighing Farmington against Victor, Canandaigua, Penfield, or anywhere else in Greater Rochester and want someone to walk through the actual parcel, the actual district, and what that combination means for your budget, Bonnie Pagano and the team are glad to talk it through with you before you get attached to a listing that isn't telling you the whole story.
