Every week someone asks me the same thing: "John, is the market up or down right now?" My honest answer is — it depends which city you're standing in. The Inland Empire isn't one market. It's a dozen little ones, and this year they did not move together.
So I pulled the real closed-sale numbers from the MLS for our core cities — the last 12 months compared to the 12 before that, measured by price per square foot (the fairest way to compare, because it adjusts for home size). Here's who actually went up:
- Montclair: +6.5% — the surprise winner, and homes sold in about 14 days.
- La Verne: +3.4%
- Claremont: +1.8% (still the priciest, around a $1.04M typical sale)
- Rancho Cucamonga: +1.6%
- Upland: +1.0%
- San Dimas: −0.9% (basically flat)
- Chino: −3.5%
- Ontario: −4.7% — the biggest cooldown.
See the pattern? The older, established, foothill-close towns — Montclair, La Verne, Claremont — held their value or climbed. The newer-construction, higher-volume areas like Ontario and Chino softened. That's not a crash; it's buyers getting priced out of the expensive towns and competing hard for the affordable ones, which is exactly why little Montclair led the whole region.
What this means if you're buying: the room to negotiate is in the cooling cities like Ontario and Chino. What it means if you're selling: in the rising towns, priced right, you're still looking at roughly two to three weeks on the market — but you have to price to today, not to last year's peak.
Because I'm both the real estate broker and the mortgage broker, I can show you the home AND the payment side by side, so you know what's actually affordable in each of these markets before you fall for a house.
Want the neighborhood-by-neighborhood breakdown for your city? I built live market pages for all of them — start at the Communities section here.
Figures: closed single-family sales, CRMLS, trailing 12 months vs. prior 12 (price per square foot), as of July 2026. Informational only — not an appraisal or a guarantee of value. John Abril, CA DRE #01060119 | NMLS #280222. Equal Housing Opportunity.