Homes for Sale in Mansfield

No other town out here has a state university sitting on an eighth of its land, with more students living on campus than four out of every ten people who live in town. Single-family homes sold at a median of $433,750 in 2025, up 9.5%, at 102.9% of asking. And the zoning here caps unrelated occupants at three per dwelling, which catches buyers out all the time.

I sell across Windham, Tolland and New London counties, and Mansfield is the town where I do the most explaining. So here's what I'd want to know if I were buying here.

Mansfield Home Prices and Market Data

Full calendar year, single-family. Source: SmartMLS, the statewide multiple listing service.

If you're moving here from the Quiet Corner, read this part twice

Windham County towns ran 96% to 101% of asking last year, on ECAR's whole-percent numbers rather than the SmartMLS figure above. Mansfield sold at 102.9% — and that sits toward the bottom of the eight Tolland County towns I cover on this site. Only Willington at 102.8% and Somers at 101.0% came in lower. Tolland ran 105.2%. Stafford 105.1%.

That's the whole story of crossing this county line. In Killingly or Woodstock you're negotiating down from list. Here you're usually bidding up. I've watched buyers bring Quiet Corner instincts to a Mansfield offer and lose three houses before they figure out why.

Volume rose 23% year over year and days on market dropped. This market tightened.

Property Taxes

Mansfield's mill rate is 20.00 on the October 1, 2024 Grand List. That's the lowest of the eight Tolland County towns I cover. And the state's special taxing district registry returns nothing for Mansfield — no fire districts, no lake districts, no service districts. One number, whole bill.

Don't get excited about the drop from 30.52 the year before. That was the 2024 revaluation resetting assessments upward. Nobody's taxes went down. The next revaluation is 2029.

One caveat on how current this is: as I write this, the Town had adopted its 2026-27 budget but hadn't published the new mill rate, and its own mill-rate history page still stopped at the 2024 Grand List. What's above is the last figure the Town has actually published. Call the Revenue Collector for this year's rate before you lean on it for a purchase — and be suspicious of any site quoting a Mansfield rate without telling you which Grand List it came from.

The Three-Unrelated-Persons Rule

This is the Mansfield fact that costs people money, and it's buried in the zoning regulations instead of anywhere a buyer would think to look.

Mansfield's zoning definition of "family" limits the number of unrelated individuals who may live in a dwelling unit to three. Units established before August 15, 2010 are grandfathered at four. There are exceptions for households that meet "functional family" criteria, plus the protections required under the ADA and Fair Housing law. Overnight guests staying three or more nights a week count as residents for compliance.

Here's why that hits your wallet. If you're valuing a property on some assumption about how many people can live in it, that assumption has a legal ceiling. Confirm the unit's established date and its grandfathered status with the Town before you write the offer. Not after.

Mansfield also wants landlord registration, a housing inspection every two years, and an approved off-street parking site plan for one-, two- and three-family dwellings. Whatever you're planning, the regulatory floor here sits higher than in the towns around it.

UConn, and What It Actually Means for Buying a House

UConn's Storrs campus enrolled 21,042 undergraduates in Fall 2025, out of 34,424 across the whole university system.

Three things that does to you as a buyer.

UConn is the employer. The Town's own audited financials call the University "a major employer for the Town and the surrounding region," with over 5,000 employees. Faculty and staff are househunting year-round, every year, and that demand doesn't rise and fall with the economy the way a mill town's does.

The campus is huge. UConn takes up roughly 5.7 of Mansfield's 44.5 square miles, and students living on campus equal 44.3% of the town's total population. It shapes the traffic, the services and the rhythm of the year in a way no other town I sell in comes close to.

Downtown has housing you can actually buy. Storrs Center, built with roughly $14.2 million in state funding, has two pockets of privately owned townhomes and condos — Main Street Homes at Storrs Center and the Courtyard at Storrs — sitting alongside the rental buildings. If you want to own something walkable in Eastern Connecticut, this is basically the only place it exists.

And the rest of the town? Not a campus at all. Mansfield is roughly 64% forested.

Mansfield Schools

Mansfield runs its own PK–8 district and has no high school of its own.

Mansfield Elementary School takes PK–4, about 549 students. It's a new consolidated net-zero building that replaced three separate elementary schools for the 2022-23 school year. Mansfield Middle School takes grades 5–8, about 414 students.

For 9–12, Mansfield is part of Regional School District 19 with Ashford and Willington. Kids go to E.O. Smith High School at 1235 Storrs Road, about 1,010 students.

E.O. Smith has a strange history. It opened in 1958 as a state-owned school run by the University of Connecticut, and UConn ran it right up until June 30, 1987. Mansfield and Ashford voters formed Region 19 effective July 1, 1987, and Willington came in in 1993. The school also takes agricultural-education students from Coventry and Windham.

Enrollment numbers here come from the National Center for Education Statistics. The Town's own website quotes a very different middle school number; I'm using the NCES figure.

Crumbling Concrete Foundations — Ask Before You Offer

Mansfield sits entirely inside the 20-mile radius of the former J.J. Mottes Concrete Company in Stafford Springs, and it's on the state's eligible-town list for foundation testing reimbursement.

The culprit is pyrrhotite. It's a mineral in the aggregate that reacts with water and oxygen over decades and cracks a poured foundation apart from the inside. It has wrecked home values across this part of Connecticut, and I'm not going to soften that.

Homes and additions built in or after 1983, per municipal assessment records, are the ones that qualify for testing reimbursement. The state reimburses visual inspection at 100% up to $400 and core testing at 50% up to $2,000.

Connecticut's Residential Property Condition Report — the form every residential seller fills out — asks about pyrrhotite straight out. It asks whether the seller knows of any testing or inspection by a licensed professional on a foundation, and whether the seller has any knowledge of pyrrhotite in a foundation on the property.

Read those questions slowly, because they ask what the seller knows. A seller who's never tested can answer "no" honestly and be completely in the right. All a "no" tells you is that nobody ever checked.

There's also a separate Residential Foundation Condition Report, but it's narrow: it applies to transfers of property in an affected municipality that was acquired by a political subdivision of the state, or through foreclosure or a deed in lieu of foreclosure. It isn't part of a normal sale and you shouldn't expect to see one.

Buying a house here built in 1983 or later? Put this on your diligence list next to the septic and the roof. Selling one? You're going to get asked.

None of this is a reason to avoid Mansfield. It's a reason to test.

I've written a full buyer's guide to this — how testing actually works, what it costs, what the state assistance program pays and doesn't, and the deadline that catches people out. Crumbling Foundations in Connecticut: What Buyers Must Do Before Closing.

Mansfield Hollow, and the Only Stone Gristmill Left in Connecticut

Mansfield Hollow Lake spreads about 450 acres across Mansfield, Windham and Chaplin, where the Natchaug, Fenton and Mount Hope Rivers meet. The dam went up in May 1952 at a cost of $6.5 million. The main structure runs 14,050 feet long and 68 feet high, and it holds 16.1 billion gallons of flood storage. The Army Corps owns 2,472 acres and DEEP leases about 2,300 of them for recreation.

Mansfield Hollow State Park at 151 Bassetts Bridge Road is free, open 8 a.m. to sunset, and you can boat, fish, hike, hunt, watch wildlife and ski Nordic there. Swimming isn't on the list of activities.

The Gurleyville Grist Mill on the Fenton River is, according to the folks who steward it, the only surviving stone gristmill in Connecticut. There's been a mill on that site since 1723; the stone building you see now dates to the 1830s and ran until 1941. The miller's cottage next door is where Wilbur Lucius Cross was born, four-term Governor of Connecticut. Joshua's Trust has looked after it since 1979.

Mansfield also carries eight National Register historic districts and listings, including Mansfield Center (1972), Gurleyville (1975), Mansfield Hollow (1979) and the Mansfield Training School and Hospital (1987).

The Practical Stuff Nobody Tells You

There are three different water providers here, plus private wells. UConn serves the northern section, Windham Water Works serves southern Mansfield, and a lot of the rest is on private wells. Which one you get is address by address. Don't assume.

Sewer is limited, and it's shared with the neighbors. Mansfield leans on UConn's treatment facility up north and Windham's down south. The Four Corners Sanitary Sewer Project, authorized under Public Act 14-98, put in roughly 22,000 feet of sewer and two pump stations at the Routes 195/44 intersection, an area that high water table and poor soils had held back for years. Outside those service areas, you're on private well and septic.

Well and septic permits run through the Eastern Highlands Health District, whose main office is right here in Mansfield at 4 South Eagleville Road. Not Town Hall.

Trash is a utility bill. Mansfield does pay-as-you-throw, so you pay for the volume you make, either through town-contracted curbside collection or by hauling it yourself to the transfer station at 221 Warrenville Road. It's real money every month & most Connecticut buyers never budget for it.

I-84 is about seven miles from downtown Storrs. There's no interstate in Mansfield itself. Coming from Hartford, take I-84 to Exit 68, then Route 195 south. Heads up: Connecticut is renumbering the I-84 exits starting June 2026, and Exit 68 becomes Exit 81. Any listing or website still using the old number is about to be wrong. Hartford's about 45 minutes with hourly express bus service, Providence just over an hour, Boston about an hour and 45.

Thinking of Selling in Mansfield?

You're selling from a strong position. 102.9% of asking, 27 days, volume up 23%.

Two things I'd get ready for. First, buyers coming out of Windham County will walk into your listing expecting to negotiate you down, and a big part of my job is setting that straight early. Second, if the house went up in 1983 or later, get the foundation question answered on your terms with a test in hand, instead of a buyer's inspector raising it three weeks into a contract.

If you want a real number on your house, I'll walk the property, pull the actual comps, and tell you honestly what I think it brings.

Nearby Towns

Mansfield borders 5 of the other towns I cover, and people looking here almost always look at a couple of them too. Same guide, same numbers, for each one:

• Ashford real estate
• Chaplin real estate
• Coventry real estate
• Willington real estate
• Windham real estate

Or see how every town in the county compares side by side in my Tolland County real estate guide.

Sources and dates. Sale price, closed sales, days on market and percent of list received: SmartMLS local market update, full-year 2025 and 2024, single-family. Mill rates, special taxing district registry and revaluation schedule: Connecticut Office of Policy and Management, October 1, 2024 Grand List, and the Town of Mansfield. School enrollment: National Center for Education Statistics, 2024-25. UConn enrollment: UConn Office of Budget, Planning and Institutional Research, Fall 2025 census. Occupancy and rental regulations: Town of Mansfield Zoning Regulations. Mansfield Hollow: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, New England District. Gurleyville Grist Mill: Joshua's Trust. Crumbling foundations: Connecticut Department of Housing and the Connecticut Foundation Solutions Indemnity Company testing program. Well and septic: Eastern Highlands Health District. Exit renumbering: Connecticut Department of Transportation.

Last updated August 2026. Tax rates and market data change — ask me for current numbers.