Town of Huntington, one town and nine very different places to live

People say "Huntington" and mean three different things: the village downtown, the hamlet around it, or the whole Town of Huntington. For Town of Huntington real estate, that last one matters, because the town is big. It sits in the northwest corner of Suffolk County, right where Suffolk meets Nassau, and it stretches from the harbors on the Long Island Sound down past the Long Island Expressway.

Inside those lines you get incorporated villages like Northport and Lloyd Harbor with their own village governments, and unincorporated hamlets like Huntington Station, Dix Hills and Centerport that are governed by the town itself. You get several separate school districts. You get waterfront, wooded hills, busy commercial corridors and quiet dead-end streets, sometimes within a few minutes of each other.

That's why we don't treat the town as one market. A house in Lloyd Harbor and a house in Huntington Station are both "Huntington," and they have almost nothing in common on price, lot size, school district or the buyer walking through the door.

The Town of Huntington was settled in 1653. It borders five harbors (Cold Spring Harbor, Lloyd Harbor, Huntington, Centerport and Northport), and the Town keeps nine beaches and three marinas for residents. Across the whole town, the Census puts the typical home's year built at 1963, and about 85 percent are single-family houses.

Our office is at 315 Main Street in Huntington Village, at Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Laffey International Realty, and we live in the village too. We moved here about six years ago and never looked back. So this town isn't a territory on a map for us. It's where we get coffee, walk the dog and run into clients at the store.

Here's what that means for you in practice. When we price a home in this town, we pull comps from the same town, the same school district and the same style of house, sold within the last three to six months. That sounds obvious. It isn't how everyone does it. In a town where crossing one road can change your school district, pulling a sale from the wrong side of the line can throw a price off badly, and appraisers notice.

We walk every house together before we put a number on it, and Mark brings 30 years in construction and homebuilding to that walk. In a town with this many older homes, expansions and additions, that walk-through matters. You can read how we get to a price on our pricing step, and how we launch a listing in our launch plan. If you're buying, start with how we work with buyers.

There's no single "Huntington house." Along the harbors you'll find waterfront and water-view homes, some of them older estates and some rebuilt. In the villages you'll find historic homes, craftsman-style homes, cottages and bungalows, a lot of them expanded more than once. Move south and inland and you'll see more capes, ranches, hi-ranches, splits and colonials from the middle of the last century. Dix Hills and Lloyd Harbor lean toward larger homes on bigger lots, and there's new construction scattered through the town where older homes have come down.

We're not going to put a median price on this page, because a town-wide average blends a Lloyd Harbor waterfront estate with a Huntington Station cape and tells you nothing useful about either one. What tells you something is a comp set built for your house: same school district, same style, similar size, sold recently. Ask us and we'll pull it. If you'd like that for your own home, start with a home valuation.

One more thing worth knowing before you list or buy here: with this many older homes and additions, permits and certificates of occupancy come up a lot. We have sellers check their file at the town building department before we list, so a missing permit gets handled on your schedule instead of in the middle of a deal.

The most useful thing you can do before touring here is decide which kind of Huntington you mean. A village street where you walk to dinner, a hamlet near the train, a wooded lot in the hills or a house on the harbor are four different searches, and they rarely overlap in price, upkeep or daily routine.

Then check the school district for every address, not just the hamlet name on the listing. Two houses with the same mailing town can sit in different districts, and that changes both the taxes and the comps. We look this up for you on every home before you fall for it.

If you are selling, the same split works in your favor when it is handled right. Buyers who want your corner of the town will pay for it. Our job is to find them, show them why your street is worth it, and price you against homes that really compete with yours. Our process page walks through how.

The Port Jefferson Branch of the Long Island Rail Road runs through the town, with stations at Cold Spring Harbor, Huntington, Greenlawn and Northport. The Long Island Expressway and the Northern State Parkway cross the southern part of town, and Route 25A runs along the north shore, connecting most of the harbor communities.

As for weekends, it depends where you land. Huntington Village has the theaters and the restaurants. Northport has the harbor and the bandstand. Cold Spring Harbor has the whaling museum and the hills. Lloyd Harbor has Caumsett. Centerport has the Vanderbilt. We can show you all of it, and we're happy to, because we'd be out there anyway.