Cedar County

What sells in Cedar County

El Dorado Springs is most of the county’s home sales — around seventy a year, most of them between roughly $100,000 and $220,000, the same range as Nevada, and about three in ten of them for cash. It’s a town built around a mineral spring: Spring Park is the middle of town, the municipal band has played there summer evenings since 1886, and the Picnic held there every July has run since 1882 — the 145th was this year. The town has its own hospital, Cedar County Memorial, with a 24-hour emergency room, a cancer-care center opening this September and a new MRI/CT suite by the end of the year; its own school district, which passed a $6 million no-tax-increase bond in 2025 to upgrade its buildings; a renovated 108-year-old swimming pool with a new splash pad; a nine-hole golf course; and a federal grant in hand for a new public-safety building. Read about buying and selling a home in El Dorado Springs →

Stockton is the county seat and the lake town: the courthouse square on one side, the marinas and the state park on the other. The square was rebuilt after the 2003 tornado and is better than it was — coffee shops, restaurants, the newspaper — and the town is home to Hammons, which has been shelling black walnuts here since 1946 and describes itself as the world’s only commercial supplier of them; the Black Walnut Festival every September has drawn crowds since 1961. Stockton R-I’s Tigers have nine state championships on the wall. Homes here sell for more than in El Dorado Springs — lake frontage and lake views carry a premium — and the buyers are as likely to come from Springfield or Kansas City as from anywhere local.

Stockton Lake itself is the reason a lot of people look at Cedar County at all. It’s about 24,900 acres with nearly 300 miles of shoreline, and because the Corps of Engineers keeps the shoreline undeveloped, a lake house here looks out on wooded hills rather than a wall of docks. A dependable southwest breeze makes it, by wide agreement, one of the best sailing lakes in the Midwest — the state park marina has 320 slips, seventy of them for sailboats, and a yacht club that races all season — and the Missouri Department of Conservation rates the walleye fishing good to excellent. Stockton State Park has a campground, cabins, a swimming beach and trails on the peninsula between the two arms of the lake, and there are a dozen Corps parks around it.

Jerico Springs and the smaller communities are farm country, with a few sales a year between them. Land in Cedar County is a mix: pasture and hay ground in the west, timber and lake-adjacent parcels toward the east. As everywhere, we don’t quote per-acre values on a website — every parcel is different — but we’ll walk yours and tell you what it’s worth.

Getting places. Highway 54 runs west to Nevada and I-49 (about thirty minutes from El Dorado Springs) and east toward Springfield (about an hour and twenty minutes); Kansas City is about two hours. Stockton is about an hour from Springfield.

What the numbers say

About 90 homes a year sell in Cedar County. Half go under contract inside 22 days, and 41% sell at or above asking. Half of all sales fall between $94,000 and $215,000. Three buyers in ten pay cash, and another 30% use a USDA, VA or FHA loan. Land runs the whole range here — the median parcel is 30 acres, a quarter are under five, and a fifth are 80 or more. (Heartland MLS closed sales, Cedar County, 2021–2026.)

Auctions in Cedar County

We held the Allison auction outside El Dorado Springs in November 2025 — a farm and everything on it, sold in a day. If you’re settling an estate or need a clean sale of a whole property, that’s what our auction service is for. Auction results · Talk to us about an auction

Selling in Cedar County

Start with what it’s actually worth. We’ll walk it, pull the sales that really compare, and give you a written valuation, free and with no obligation. Find out what your property is worth →

Buying in Cedar County

Every Cedar County listing in the MLS is below, updated straight from the MLS. If what you want isn’t listed yet, tell us what you’re looking for — a lake lot or a farm often changes hands before it’s ever advertised.

Talk to us

Curtis and Sons, Inc.
121 S. Main St., Nevada, MO 64772 — on the square
417.667.7868 · office@curtisandsonsrealty.com

Call, email, or tell us what you’re looking for and we’ll get back to you the same business day.