Fairfax, Madisonville, and Newport: Cincinnati Real Estate in 2026

Where Cincinnati Investors Are Still Finding Margin

In Fairfax, empty lots that once sat overlooked are now selling for $120,000 to $150,000, driven almost entirely by proximity to the Mariemont school district. Jerry Garrison, a Keller Williams agent and single-family investor who has worked Greater Cincinnati real estate for two decades, has watched that price shift play out street by street, first in Fairfax, then in Madisonville, and now across the river in Newport, Kentucky.

About This Post

This analysis draws from a conversation with Jerry Garrison, a Keller Williams real estate agent and long-time Greater Cincinnati investor with two decades of experience across multifamily and single-family properties. His vantage point as both a working agent and an active landlord in Madisonville and Newport makes his neighborhood-level read unusually current.

Listen to the full conversation on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube. The full episode also covers Garrison's take on Evanston, East Walnut Hills, and the Cincinnati west side, along with his advice for someone making their first real estate investment in 2026.

The Cincy REI Show publishes every Monday. New episodes cover neighborhood-level analysis, local investor strategies, and real deal stories from operators active in Greater Cincinnati.

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Where Cincinnati Investors Are Finding Margin in 2026

Fairfax sits just west of Mariemont, close enough to the same school district to carry its price effect. Lots that trade around $120,000 are now targets for builders running a townhouse format: three bedroom, two and a half bath, with a finished lower level and a garage offset from the front entry where the lot allows it. The style fits parcels platted in 1884 or 1904, long and narrow, with living space stacked over three or four floors instead of spread across a yard.
Madisonville is where Garrison bought his first rental in 2017, a house on Britton Street for $105,000. He listed it for $1,200 a month and had 20 people show up to see it. Rent on that property and others like it now runs $2,000 and higher, and Garrison estimates some of his Madisonville homes have appreciated 60% since purchase. Madison Road itself has been reshaped by developers replacing single-story retail, the kind that once housed an auto body shop and an ice cream parlor, with three and four story mixed-use buildings: retail on the ground floor, class A apartments above.
Madison Place, bordering Mariemont on the other side from Fairfax, sat at $80,000 to $120,000 for years while comparable Mariemont homes traded near $350,000, despite both being the same distance from downtown. That gap is now closing as buyers push into Madison Place and Madisonville looking for the value Fairfax no longer offers.
Newport, Kentucky has become Garrison's cross-river play as Ohio-side margins tighten. Property taxes there run lower than Hamilton County even though owners pay both city and county tax. The tradeoff is a stricter inspection process and a contractor pool that mostly is not licensed in Kentucky, which drove up Garrison's early rehab costs while he built out a new set of trade relationships.
Covington, just past Newport, is earning a look for the same reason: lower cost of ownership and, in Garrison's words, a neighborhood with good vibe worth familiarizing himself with.
Old Milford, where Garrison lives, is a small walkable pocket distinct from the broader Milford footprint. It carries turn-of-the-century two-story retail buildings with a single apartment over each storefront, recently anchored by Little Miami Brewing. The wider Milford area, by contrast, is mostly 1950s ranch stock inside 275 and 1990s-to-current subdivisions and class B multifamily further out.

The Mariemont School District Effect

The clearest structural pattern in this conversation is a school district acting as a hard price line between adjacent neighborhoods. For years, a home in Mariemont carried a $350,000 price tag while an equally close, equally built Madison Place home sold for $80,000 to $120,000. Fairfax absorbed the same effect once buyers realized it shared the Mariemont district: land that once carried a stigma because of its Fairfax address is now marketed and priced as Mariemont schools.

That appreciation has a cost. Longtime Madisonville homeowners, some who have owned for 30 to 40 years, are now being squeezed by rising property tax valuations tied to the same appreciation investors are capturing. Garrison notes some are relocating to apartments because they can no longer carry the tax bill on a home they own outright. For an investor, this is worth tracking as both an opportunity signal and a reason to expect continued turnover in these corridors as the tax burden displaces longtime owners.

This is the throughline across Cincinnati real estate right now: proximity to a strong school district or a strong urban corridor is compressing what used to be wide price gaps between adjacent neighborhoods, and that compression is happening faster than it did a decade ago because information about these markets is far more available than it used to be.

What's Working in Cincinnati

Garrison's approach comes down to a small number of repeatable principles.

Know your margin before anything else. Garrison defines this simply: what is left after your expenses and your mortgage are paid. Every acquisition decision runs through that number first.
Concentrate in one area before you scale. Early on, especially before hiring a property manager, working scattered properties across neighborhoods wastes time and misses deal flow. Garrison picked up an off-market Fairfax flip simply because he was already renovating next door when the neighbor listed her house.
Shift to value-add and fix-and-flip as a market tightens. In Madisonville, Garrison's read for 2026 is that the play is improving a property enough to force appreciation and resell it, rather than counting on a discount at purchase, since 6% interest rates and already-elevated prices have compressed that margin.
Expand across the river when the home market compresses. Newport and Covington offer a real cost of ownership advantage, even accounting for double taxation and a more expensive first year of learning who to hire.

What is not working: buying in Madisonville expecting a discount. Garrison is blunt that the neighborhood is fully discovered now, and margins there keep getting tighter as more buyers compete for the same data everyone can see on Zillow and BiggerPockets.

Lessons From the Field: Surviving a Recession When Your Funding Partner Walks

In 2005, Garrison was a newer real estate agent when a client offered a simple arrangement: the client would find capital and financing, and Garrison would locate properties and run the rehabs. The partnership worked well at first, and they scaled quickly into a portfolio of multifamily properties.

The problem was capitalization. They bought more than the partnership could comfortably carry, and the timing lined up badly. By 2008, the broader recession had arrived and the portfolio was already stretched thin. Garrison held on through several difficult years, but the real break came in 2012, when his business partner, going through a divorce, told him in person that he was done funding the properties.

Garrison had built his half of the arrangement on rehabs and hustle, not capital, and he was suddenly the one left holding roughly 100 units with no salaried partner behind them. He did not declare bankruptcy, but his credit score took a serious hit as he worked to sell down the portfolio during a recession. What got him through, by his own account, was a track record of keeping his word. A few lenders and counterparties gave him extra time when they did not have to, because of how he had dealt with them before.

The experience reset his risk tolerance completely. Garrison describes spending roughly five years afterward deliberately risk averse before he started slowly building his investment portfolio back, this time as a disciplined single-family buy-and-hold and flip investor rather than a leveraged multifamily operator.

A partner's personal life is part of your deal risk. Garrison's funding disappeared because of a divorce, not a market event. Structure partnerships assuming the other side's circumstances can change without warning.
Under-capitalization does not show up until conditions turn. The portfolio performed fine until 2008 exposed how thin the reserves actually were.
A forced sale is still a skill worth having. Selling around 100 units during a recession, out of necessity, built the sales ability Garrison now relies on as a full-time agent.
Reputation outlasts a credit score. Keeping commitments through the wind-down bought him grace from people who had no obligation to extend it.
Risk tolerance needs a real reset period after a crisis. Five years passed before Garrison was ready to invest again, and he treated that timeline as necessary rather than something to rush.