Every buyer asks some version of this once they start watching listings closely: a house they liked shows “pending,” and they want to know if that means it’s actually sold, or if there’s still a chance.

Here’s the honest, slightly annoying answer: in the Columbus and Central Ohio Regional MLS, “pending” and “contingent” are lumped into one bucket. The system doesn’t report them separately. So when you see “pending” here, what you actually know is: the home is under some kind of contract. What you don’t know from that label alone is how solid that contract is.

Why the difference matters

A true pending sale — financing approved, contingencies cleared, just waiting on the closing date — falls through rarely. A contingent contract, especially one contingent on the buyer selling their own home first, or on an unresolved inspection or appraisal issue, falls through meaningfully more often.

Practically, this means:

  • If you’re a buyer who loves a “pending” home, it is not automatically dead. It’s worth a call to the listing agent asking specifically where the file stands — cleared contingencies or open ones — before you cross it off. I do this for my own buyers routinely, and it’s a five-minute call, not an imposition.
  • If you’re a seller trying to gauge how many homes near you have genuinely sold versus how many are still shaky, “pending” alone won’t tell you that. You have to ask, or wait for it to either close or bounce back onto the market.

What the current numbers actually show

Contract activity — pending listings — is down across the board this cycle, and by a lot, in every geography I track:

  • Lancaster (43130): pending listings down 26.2% year over year this month
  • Canal Winchester (43110): down 35.3%
  • Greater Lancaster area: down 30.2%
  • Central Ohio overall: down 25.5%

That’s a real, broad-based slowdown in how many contracts are getting written right now, not just a Lancaster story. I want to be careful about what this does and doesn’t mean: it does not mean fewer homes are eventually closing at the same pace they were a year ago — some of last year’s pendings included contingent deals that never closed, and this data doesn’t let me cleanly separate that out. What it does tell you is that fewer buyers are signing contracts right now, across the whole region, than they were a year ago.

The practical read

If you’re a buyer, slower contract activity across the board is one more reason not to write off a “pending” listing without checking. If you’re a seller, don’t read your own local pending count as a precise measure of finished sales — and don’t assume a neighbor’s “pending” sign means a deal is done until it’s actually closed.