The sequence, before anyone falls for the towpath
- Put the headline median aside and ask your agent to pull borough-only closed sales from Bright MLS.
- Get pre-approved for the range that comes out of that, and find out early whether the price carries you over $832,750 and into a jumbo file.
- If the exterior needs anything at all, put HARB’s monthly meeting and its 21-business-day filing rule into the settlement date.
- Get the address onto the flood map before the inspection period closes. The borough sits in the National Flood Insurance Program, and the premium belongs inside the monthly figure you plan around.
- Then choose between downtown and Solebury, because a 200-year-old frame house and a farmhouse on twelve acres are two different files.
The number nobody should quote
Published medians for New Hope come from ZIP 18938, and 18938 includes Solebury. One site put July 2026 at $1,764,500 on a sale count the borough could not produce in twelve months, and Solebury’s own figure that month rested on two closings. There is no honest borough-only closed median in the public sources, so ask your agent to pull borough sales from Bright MLS before you build a budget on a headline.
What you can plan on: transfer tax at 2%, half of it customarily yours, and the county listing no municipality above the standard rate. On a $1,000,000 sale, that is $20,000 total and $10,000 on your side. PHFA’s Keystone Home Loan stops at a $588,800 purchase price and Keystone Flex at $730,600, so a good share of this market sits above both.
Picked up day and night, calls recorded. No credit pull, no application.
Tell us the address and whether it sits in the historic district, and a licensed Pennsylvania lender who does this kind of loan calls you back before HARB's next meeting date starts to matter. Worth a call before the offer.
The form takes about a minute and lands in the same place as the call.
Old, small-lotted, and nearly built out
New Hope Borough was founded in 1707, incorporated in 1837, and had 2,612 residents in 2020. The New Hope Village District is on the National Register, the Delaware Canal runs through the middle of town with the Lock 11 locktender’s house still standing, and the borough’s comprehensive plan says growth here means redevelopment because there is nothing left to subdivide. What sells is detached singles and twins on small downtown lots, townhouses, apartment-style condos, and apartments over Main Street storefronts.
Cross into Solebury and the stock changes completely: fieldstone farmhouses with bank barns and outbuildings, estate houses on acreage, newer colonials on large lots, with more than 4,000 acres under township easement and roughly 40% of the land protected.
For a loan that means two different files. A 200-year-old frame house downtown brings pre-1978 lead disclosure, an appraiser hunting for comparable sales, and an insurer asking about the roof, the wiring and the heating. A farmhouse on twelve acres brings acreage questions, outbuilding value the appraiser may not credit, and often a price above the $832,750 conforming limit, which makes it a jumbo file with 700-plus credit and reserves in the underwriting.
The review board is part of your timeline
Before a zoning or building permit for exterior work visible from a public way, the borough requires a Certificate of Appropriateness. The list is long: additions, replacement, rehab, restoration, demolition, relocation, signs, lighting, fencing, and painting. Applications go in at least 21 business days before the monthly HARB meeting, and Council issues the certificate afterward. Interiors are exempt. Solebury runs its own board and processed 20 applications in 2025.
That matters to a mortgage in one specific way. Any loan with a repair or renovation component needs a scope of work, and here the scope has to be one the board will approve, on the board’s calendar. Build the meeting date into the settlement date instead of discovering it in week three.
The river, and what it has done
Flood stage at the New Hope gauge is 13 feet. Diane put the record at 24.16 feet in August 1955, and the 1903 crest reached 22.30. In the modern era: 19.60 feet in April 2005, 19.08 in June 2006, 16.50 during Ivan in September 2004 and 16.14 during Lee in 2011. Three main-stem floods arrived inside 22 months in 2004 to 2006, and fourteen floods were logged between 1903 and 2016.
Ida took out the center pier of the Lumberville Aqueduct and breached the towpath at High Falls. Six million dollars of canal repair work was celebrated in May 2026. The borough carries a floodplain overlay and is in the National Flood Insurance Program. Run the address through FEMA’s Map Service Center, and if it comes back A or AE, get the premium in writing before you remove the mortgage contingency.
Taxes, tolls, and getting anywhere
New Hope-Solebury’s school rate was 120.51 mills in 2025-26, among the lower rates in Bucks and attached to the county’s second-highest average bill, $7,181. The borough’s earned income tax is 0.5% and the local services tax is $10 a year. Solebury passed its 2026 budget with no tax increase and kept its Aa1 rating.
There is no train. Doylestown, the end of the Lansdale/Doylestown Line, is the nearest station. The Route 202 toll bridge to Lambertville went to open-road electronic tolling on June 24, 2026, with the first transaction at 11:01 that morning and only Pennsylvania-bound traffic charged; the old cash plaza is coming down. On a Saturday in October, the bridge is not the slow part. Mechanic Street is, and the High Heel Drag Race takes it over on October 25.
