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James Rawley
★★★★★
Colin’s deep knowledge of the market was invaluable. He made what could have been a stressful experience feel manageable and pleasant. I would recommend him to anyone buying in the Troy area.
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Troy, NY · Rensselaer County
Troy, NY Homes for Sale
A working-Belle-Époque downtown, brownstone stock intact enough to have doubled as film sets, and a river you can actually walk to. Priced like an upstate small city, built like one twice its size.
Inventory
Current listings in Troy
Homes for sale in Troy, updated live from the Global MLS. Troy inventory moves fast — August 2026 had a ten-day median time on market and 122 closings, up from 100 the prior year. If nothing here fits your neighborhood, price band or two-family requirement, tell us what you are looking for and we will watch the MLS and pocket network for you.
Who You’ll Work With
Meet your Troy agent
Colin McDonald
Broker / Owner · NYS Licensed Real Estate Broker #10491210476
Colin is a Capital Region native who has closed more than $300 million in career sales and over 300 transactions, including the highest recorded closings in Albany County in 2019 and 2020. He opened McDonald Real Estate Company in Troy in 2021 after years as a top producer at Berkshire Hathaway Home Services.
Our office is on 2nd Street in downtown Troy — a block off Monument Square, in the middle of the market we spend most of our week walking. That is the whole argument for working with us here: we do not commute in to sell Troy, we live in it, and the difference shows up in the things a buyer wants to know before writing an offer — which brownstones share a wet party wall, which blocks lose parking every Wednesday for street cleaning, which listings will fall out of contract because the buyer did not budget for historic-district review.
Reviews
Over 300+ Clients in Their Dream Homes
Google and Zillow reviews from across the Capital Region.
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lenderking
★★★★★
Phenomenal both when I bought and sold. Responsive, professional, thorough. Bought and sold in Arbor Hill, Albany — Colin knew the block better than the listing agent did.
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Amy Dall
★★★★★
Colin is really knowledgeable, fun, available, responsive and knows everyone! He was able to schedule 3 different contractors for estimates in the same 1 hour time frame. I had a VERY modest budget and he treated me like I was buying a million dollar home.
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Gina Feliciano
★★★★★
Colin found a gorgeous Marcus Reynolds condo in the Center Square Neighborhood. He’s the only realtor I’ll use. Knows the historic buildings by name.
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Kristopher Constable
★★★★★
I sent in the offer in January and closed in February! Him and his team are the best people for the job in Albany County!
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Leigh Wedenoja
★★★★★
He got me to see every listing I was even a little interested in — 10 in one Sunday. I cold called him a couple weeks before Halloween and we closed before Thanksgiving.
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Pete Hawkins
★★★★★
I’ve been able to work alongside McDonald Real Estate Co. on a number of inspections. They are knowledgeable and enthusiastic advocates for their clients.
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Abigail Possinger
★★★★★
He made the process of buying my second home even simpler than the first time around.
The Place
What is life in Troy like?
Troy is a small city with an unusually intact 19th-century downtown. The industrial money that built it — iron, textiles, collar-and-cuff manufacturing — peaked before 1900 and then never quite came back, which paradoxically saved the architecture from mid-century demolition cycles. What you get, walking a downtown block today, is stone and cast-iron building fronts that in any other city would have been replaced with a parking garage by 1965.
The rest of Troy is neighborhoods, and the neighborhood you buy in is the answer. Downtown and North Central are the brownstone and rowhouse core. South Central and South Troy skew brick and frame two-families, with the classic Troy investment stock. Frear Park and Sycaway sit up the hill, mid- century single-family with driveways and yards. Lansingburgh runs north along the river with older Colonial and Federal housing stock and its own school district history. The MLS shows all of it under “Troy” and the portals do not distinguish between them — but the buyer’s decision is a neighborhood decision, not a city decision.
The colleges organize the calendar. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Russell Sage and Emma Willard all sit inside city limits, and their move-in weeks (mid-August through early September) drive the peak of the rental market and a specific window of the two-family investment market. Albany is fifteen minutes over the Menands Bridge. Manhattan is two and a half hours by Amtrak from Rensselaer. The Troy Waterfront Farmers Market runs year-round on Saturday — the largest in the Capital Region — and is a real weekly ritual, not a summer novelty.
How We Help
Our services in Troy
Buyers, sellers, investors and homeowners downsizing out of a Troy address. Each of these is a real workflow — not a landing page. Follow any link for the details.
Buy a home in Troy
Full buyer representation from first coffee to keys. Pre-approval strategy, neighborhood shortlist, historic-district screening, offer strategy in a 10-day-median market. Buyer services are typically free — the seller pays the commission at closing.
Sell a home in Troy
Full-service listing built for Troy specifically: pricing a historic address against the right comp set, professional photography and video, staging advice for brownstone stock, and marketing that reaches downstate and college-town buyers, not just the Capital Region MLS.
What’s my Troy home worth?
Free comparative market analysis, priced against the last 90 days of closed comps in your specific neighborhood and property type. Not a Zestimate. We walk the house, review deferred maintenance, and give you a defensible list price range with a target number.
Invest in a Troy two-family or duplex
The Troy investment path: owner-occupied two-family in South Central, South Troy or Lansingburgh, financed as a primary residence, tenants covering most of the mortgage. We verify legal C of O status, walk the heating system, and model the rent roll before you offer.
Sell a Troy rental with tenants in place
Selling occupied is a different sale — showings, notice, lease transfer, and buyer pool (owner-occupant vs. investor) all shift. We handle the tenant conversations, structure showings that do not hurt the occupied unit’s valuation, and market to the buyer pool that actually closes on tenanted properties.
Downsize out of a Troy address
Selling a long-held Troy home and buying smaller — often a condo in the Cannon Building or River Triangle, a one-story in Frear Park, or a move out of the Capital Region entirely. We coordinate the sale and the purchase so you are not carrying two mortgages or renting between them.
Local Knowledge
What to know before buying in Troy
Four things a Troy buyer is surprised by, and three of them cost money. None of them appear in a Zillow listing description.
Historic-district review is not optional
Central Troy is a National Register historic district, and the city’s Historic District & Landmarks Review Commission has authority over exterior work on covered properties — windows, doors, roofing material, storefronts, cornices, signage. Buyers who plan to swap the front windows for vinyl or add a rear deck without a Certificate of Appropriateness get stopped. We tell you before you offer whether the address is in the district, and what your planned changes will actually require.
The Historic Homeowner Tax Credit that most agents miss
New York State’s Historic Homeowner Tax Credit reimburses 20% of qualified rehabilitation costs on owner-occupied properties inside a National Register historic district — up to $50,000 in credit per project, on qualifying expenses of $5,000 or more, with at least 5% of the work spent on the exterior. Most Central Troy addresses qualify. Most buyers do not know the credit exists. We flag the eligible addresses on your shortlist and hand off to a preservation-savvy CPA before you close.
Party walls, cast-iron stacks and cellar water
A pre-1900 Troy brownstone or rowhouse shares a masonry party wall with the house on each side. Chimney flues, roof drainage and shared parapet conditions all follow. Under the floor, most of these buildings still run cast-iron drain lines with limited remaining service life, and cellars in the downtown core see seasonal groundwater. None of it is a deal-killer. All of it wants three specific inspection line items: sewer scope from the trap to the city main, cellar moisture check with the plumbing running, and a roof drainage look with the neighbor’s side included.
Enlarged City School District boundaries do not follow the city line
The Enlarged City School District of Troy covers most of the city plus a portion of the Town of Brunswick, and pieces of the city are actually in Lansingburgh, Averill Park or Wynantskill Union Free districts instead. A listing field labeled “Troy schools” is not verification. We confirm every address against district maps before you offer, because you cannot renegotiate the school district after closing.
Why Here
What Troy has that you won’t find anywhere else in upstate New York
A dozen upstate cities have one of these. A city of fifty thousand people, on the Hudson, that has all four at once is the part that is hard to repeat.
A downtown that Hollywood keeps borrowing
The Belle-Époque and cast-iron facades along River Street, First and Second are complete enough that period films film here rather than build the set on a lot. The Age of Innocence, Ironweed, Scent of a Woman and The Bostonians all used Troy blocks as 19th-century New York or Boston. Buyers touring a Troy brownstone are walking through the same architecture the cameras did.
A year-round Saturday farmers market
The Troy Waterfront Farmers Market runs 52 weeks a year and is the largest in the Capital Region — outdoors along River Street from May through October, indoors at the Atrium through the winter. It anchors a Saturday morning routine that turns Troy addresses into a life, not just a commute answer. Buyers who move here from Albany or Boston mention it back to us unprompted after their first February.
Three colleges inside city limits
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Russell Sage and Emma Willard all sit inside Troy. The unusual part is not the college count — upstate has many college towns — it is that Troy has three, in a small city, without feeling like a college town. Downtown does not empty in May. The two-family investment market runs on the college calendar; the single-family market does not. We help buyers on both sides tell the two markets apart.
A walkable Hudson riverfront in a small city
Riverfront Park runs the length of downtown along the Hudson, with Uncle Sam Bikeway extending north into Lansingburgh. You can walk from a Second Street brownstone to the river in five minutes. Most upstate cities of this size put a highway between the downtown and the water. Troy did not. The tradeoff: portions of the low-lying blocks along the water sit inside FEMA flood zones — we pull the map before you offer.
Questions
Frequently asked questions
What is the median home price in Troy right now?
Over the three months ending August 2026 the Troy median sale price was approximately $255,000, up about 4% year over year, with a median $/sqft of roughly $152 (Redfin, MLS). Neighborhood medians differ: South Troy single-family homes are trading closer to $294,900 and Sycaway around $275,000 (Homes.com). Rensselaer County as a whole is running a higher median listing price near $350,000 (FRED, series MEDLISPRI36083) because it includes the more expensive towns east and south of the city.
How fast are Troy homes selling?
Fast when they are priced correctly. Median time on market in Troy for the three months ending August 2026 was about 10 days, versus 19 days the year prior (Redfin). Well-priced single-family homes in Frear Park and Sycaway routinely go under contract within a weekend. Downtown brownstones and two-families in condition-dependent shape can sit longer — the buyer pool is narrower and inspection findings are heavier.
Which Troy neighborhood should I look in?
Depends on what you want the house to do. Downtown and North Central for brownstones and the Belle-Époque core. South Central and South Troy for two-family investment stock and owner-occupied brick. Frear Park and Sycaway for mid-century single-family with a yard and driveway. Lansingburgh for older housing stock with a distinct school-district history along the river. We tour buyers across three or four before they commit — the neighborhoods do not substitute for each other.
Is Troy a good place to buy an investment property?
Troy has one of the deepest two-family and three-family stocks in the Capital Region, and RPI, Russell Sage and Emma Willard drive a steady rental demand cycle tied to the academic calendar. Owner-occupied duplexes in South Central and Lansingburgh remain a workable first-investment path. The critical filters are heating system (steam versus forced air), certificate of occupancy status, and whether the property is grandfathered as legal two- or three-family — that last one is where most first-time investors get caught.
Do I need historic district approval to renovate a Troy brownstone?
If the property is inside a Troy local historic district or on a listed landmark site, exterior changes visible from the public right-of-way generally require a Certificate of Appropriateness from the city’s Historic District & Landmarks Review Commission. That covers windows, doors, roofing material, cornices, storefronts, signage and often color. Interior renovations are not regulated by the commission. National Register listing on its own does not create a review requirement, but the local district often overlaps with it in Central Troy.
What is the New York State Historic Homeowner Tax Credit?
A New York State income tax credit worth 20% of qualified rehabilitation costs on owner-occupied historic homes inside a listed historic district, up to $50,000 per project. Qualifying projects must total at least $5,000 in eligible expenses and put at least 5% of the work on the building’s exterior. Most Central Troy addresses inside the National Register district qualify. Application runs through the State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO) before work begins.
Which Troy addresses are in the Enlarged City School District?
Most of the city, plus a portion of the Town of Brunswick, sits in the Enlarged City School District of Troy (seven schools, roughly 3,500 students). But parts of the city are actually zoned into the Lansingburgh, Averill Park or Wynantskill districts. Listing fields and school-rating sites frequently mislabel. We verify with the district office before you offer — especially critical for families and for investors marketing to school-driven tenants.
What are the property taxes like in Troy?
Troy’s effective property tax rate is among the higher rates in the Capital Region — a function of a smaller taxable base carrying municipal services and the school district. City, county and school levies are billed separately and on different fiscal calendars. Before you offer we pull the current tax card, verify the assessment, and check for any active STAR credit registration or veterans exemption. Owner-occupants who purchased after August 1, 2015 register directly with the state for the STAR credit at tax.ny.gov.
Which parts of Troy flood, and does it affect insurance?
Low-lying blocks along the Hudson — parts of the downtown riverfront and pockets of Lansingburgh — sit inside FEMA Special Flood Hazard Areas. A property in an SFHA generally requires flood insurance if the mortgage is federally backed. Higher-elevation neighborhoods (Frear Park, Sycaway, most of North Central above River) are not affected. We pull the FEMA flood map for every address on your shortlist before you offer.
Do Troy homes have parking?
In the downtown brownstone blocks, usually not off-street — most rowhouses do not have driveways or garages, and residents rely on street parking with alternate-side rules and street-cleaning schedules. South Troy and Lansingburgh have more rear-lot parking and driveways. Frear Park and Sycaway are almost universally single-family with driveways and often garages. If off-street parking is non-negotiable, the neighborhood filters most of the search for you.
Looking to make a move in Troy?
Feel free to reach out for a no pressure – no obligation appointment.
(518) 505-4977
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