Where the numbers come from.

Every parcel count, sale price and assessed value on the neighborhood guides comes from a county record, not from a listing site and not from an estimate. This page says which record, from which date, and what it leaves out.

MLS sale figures, and what they are not

The town level sale figures on the community guides come from the Black Hills MLS, read through the Ascend Realty statistical tool. They are average sold prices. The tool does not publish a town level median, so no figure on this site is a median, and none of them is an assessed value or a census survey estimate.

Every one is filtered to single family homes, which means bare land, manufactured homes on their own lots and condominiums are not in the count. The MLS also records a single city for each listing, and rural property in this region is routinely filed under the nearest larger town. St. Onge is the clearest case: acreage there commonly lists under Spearfish or Belle Fourche, so a search on the town name returns nothing while ground changes hands. Read a small town count as the floor on what traded, not the total.

Then the fact that matters most. Western South Dakota is served by two multiple listing services, the Black Hills MLS and the Mount Rushmore Area MLS, and a figure drawn from one of them does not describe a town covered by the other. Every market figure on this site names which service it came from. Where a town sits in one service's territory and no figure from that service is available, this site says so rather than publishing the other service's partial view. Newell, Nisland and St. Onge are all Mount Rushmore Area territory, so no price level is published for them. The two services are merging, and these figures will be re-pulled from the combined data when it is live.

Why there are no subdivision level MLS figures here

The MLS records subdivision as free text somebody types into a field, so one development shows up under several spellings and abbreviations, and some listings carry no subdivision at all. Hart Ranch alone appears under three separate entries.

So this site does not publish subdivision level or plat level MLS averages, even though the data is technically available. A count built off that field is a floor of unknown depth rather than a measure of the market, and an average drawn from it describes whichever listings happened to be labeled consistently.

Town level and MLS area level figures do not have that problem. Every listing carries a city and an area, so those figures are published here. For a specific property, recorded county sales are the source, because they follow the parcel rather than a text field.

Where the buyers come from

Over the twelve months through August 2026, the Black Hills MLS recorded 1,949 single family sales worth $839.39 million. Seventy point four percent of those buyers were in state and 29.6 percent were from out of state.

The more interesting number is the money. Out of state buyers made 29.6 percent of the purchases but accounted for 32.8 percent of the dollars, $275.60 million against $563.79 million from in state buyers. So out of state buyers are, on average, buying more expensive houses than local buyers are.

That is worth knowing whichever side of the table you are on. If you are selling at the upper end of the market, roughly a third of your likely buyers are not in South Dakota yet and are shopping online first, which changes how a listing should be presented. If you are buying locally under that level, you are competing mostly with your neighbors.

Pennington County sale prices

Recorded sale prices come from Pennington County assessor data published through Rapid City and Pennington County RapidMap GIS, covering November 2023 to October 2025. These are recorded sale prices, not list prices and not assessed values. Bulk multi-parcel transfers are excluded. The count includes builder-direct sales that never reach the MLS, which is why it runs higher than an MLS search of the same subdivision.

Nothing after October 30, 2025 is published yet. The county property portal has been offline since a cybersecurity incident in July 2026, so there is no second source to fill the gap. Some transactions carry an assessor flag whose meaning the county does not publish, and those are read as sales rather than guessed at. For anything more current, write to roy@henryroyrealestate.com and we can talk about what is available.

Parcel counts, and why two dates appear on one page

Parcel counts come from a different county system than sale prices, current to August 2026. That is why a page can carry sales through October 2025 and parcel counts through August 2026. Both are correct and they measure different things.

A parcel counts as built when the county has a structure on file for it, so a house finished after the pull still shows as bare ground. A bare lot is a lot with no house on it. It is not a listing, and most are owned by somebody who is not selling. Slivers, drainage strips and common ground under a twentieth of an acre are counted separately, because the county plats them but nothing can be built there.

Meade County

Counts and values come from the free public Meade County parcel layer hosted by the City of Rapid City, accessed August 2026. It is the open layer, not the county subscription portal. Meade County does not publish sale prices the way Pennington County does, so the guides carry assessed values there. South Dakota assesses at market value and the state runs ratio studies against actual sales, so assessed value is a reasonable guide to the range, but it is the assessor's opinion of value rather than what someone paid.

Lawrence County

Parcel counts come from the free public Lawrence County parcel service, which runs to a 2023 cutoff. Whether a parcel carries a house is read from the county year built field, so those figures describe 2023 rather than today. In a subdivision still under construction, treat the built count as a floor. Lawrence County assessed values sit behind the Beacon subscription portal and its terms do not allow republishing, so no dollar figures from that source appear on this site.

What is never published here

No median is printed on fewer than five recorded sales. Between five and nine the figure carries a small sample note. Parcel counts that do not add up are not published at all: if the built, bare, sliver, improved and exempt buckets do not sum to the platted total, the block renders nothing rather than showing a number I cannot stand behind.

I do not rate schools and I do not characterize neighborhoods as safe or unsafe. District boundaries, water quality reports and county assessments are linked on every guide so those readings are yours to make from the record.