August 6, 2026
Look at Redmond's citywide numbers for the three months ending May 2026 and the market appears to be catching its breath: a $1.3 million median sale price, essentially flat year over year, and 12 days on market. Look at the submarkets on either side of the new light rail line and the picture inverts. Southeast Redmond's median is up 31.4% over the same window. Redmond Estates is up 20.3%. Two neighborhoods inside the same city are telling opposite stories, and the citywide figure is the average of a divergence, not a description of a market.
Buyers comparing Eastside cities usually stop at three data points: median, days on market, and year-over-year change. Redmond's headline reads as a soft landing. The Zillow Home Value Index put the average Redmond home value at $1,364,438 as of June 30, 2026, down 4.1% year over year. Orchard's 30-day snapshot in June 2026 showed the median at $1.3 million, down 8.8% year over year, with 32.79% of listings taking price drops and a 97.5% sale-to-list ratio. A cooling market, if that were the whole story.
It is not. Redfin's neighborhood-level data for the three months ending May 2026 shows Southeast Redmond selling at a $1.3 million median, up 31.4% year over year, with price per square foot up 5.7% to $727. Redmond Estates closed the three months ending March 2026 at a $1.7 million median, up 20.3%. Same city, same quarter, opposite direction.
| Area | Median (3-mo, 2026) | YoY change | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Redmond citywide | $1.30M | -0.06% | 12 days on market, 161 May sales |
| Southeast Redmond | $1.30M | +31.4% | $727/sf, +5.7% YoY |
| Redmond Estates | $1.70M | +20.3% | $696/sf, +40.0% YoY |
| SE Redmond (Zillow ZHVI) | $989,896 | -3.9% | Averages older stock into the number |
The Zillow ZHVI for Southeast Redmond reads down 3.9% because the index blends the older detached and industrial-adjacent stock with the newer transit-oriented product. Redfin's sale-based median captures what actually traded. Both are accurate. They answer different questions.
The Downtown Redmond Link extension opened May 10, 2025, adding the 3.4-mile segment between Redmond Technology and Downtown Redmond. Two stations came online: Marymoor Village, with a 1,400-stall parking garage, and Downtown Redmond, the elevated terminus at 166th Avenue Northeast. On paper, the parking garage should have driven ridership. It did not. By June 2025, Downtown Redmond had become the 2 Line's busiest station, with more than 42,000 boardings that month, while Marymoor Village settled into third-to-last on the line.
Sound Transit's own analyst told the board that a terminus outperforming despite limited parking was unexpected. It is less surprising once you count the units. More than 6,000 homes have been added to downtown Redmond in recent decades, and roughly 8,500 units across Southeast Redmond and downtown since 1999. The station opened into a neighborhood that had been zoned and built to absorb it. The parking garage opened into a neighborhood that has not yet been built.
For a buyer, that gap is the market signal. The station-adjacent price appreciation is not speculative anticipation of what light rail might bring. It is a repricing of homes whose commute cost just fell. Downtown Redmond Station now offers a car-free ride to Downtown Bellevue, Redmond Technology, and, since March 28, 2026, across Lake Washington to the 1 Line. Every detached or attached home within a walkable radius picked up an amenity that did not exist eighteen months ago. Southeast Redmond's 31.4% jump is what that amenity is worth in resale terms.
The other reason citywide numbers look muted is that thousands of new units have entered the rental and condo stock at price points below the detached median, dragging the blended average down while station-adjacent detached and townhome pricing climbs. A partial roster of what has opened around Marymoor Village alone:
The pipeline is not slowing. Redmond's Marymoor Village development regulations were updated effective June 28, 2025, consolidating five zoning districts into three and allowing buildings up to 12 stories where five or six were previously the ceiling. The City of Redmond's zoning summary is the source document for anyone verifying the change. For a buyer, the practical read is that supply pressure on entry-level attached product in Southeast Redmond will keep building for years, while the detached inventory near the two stations remains fixed at whatever exists today.
The transaction-level friction shows up in three places, and it catches buyers who priced Redmond off the citywide median.
Comp selection. Appraisers pulling comps within a half-mile radius of a station-adjacent listing now face a genuine mismatch between recent sales and the neighborhood's older transaction history. In three-month windows this small, one or two outlier sales move a median several percentage points. Southeast Redmond recorded only four sales in May 2026, down from 23 the year before. A buyer writing an offer at the neighborhood's recent trend and an appraiser working from a broader dataset can arrive at very different numbers on the same house.
Sale-to-list behavior. Citywide, 14.75% of Redmond homes sold above list in the 30 days ending in June 2026, down 20.2 points from a year earlier, and 32.79% of listings took a price cut, up 22.1 points. That is a market where mispriced homes sit and correctly priced homes still move. Well-priced station-adjacent inventory continues to draw multiple offers inside two weeks. Overpriced inventory anywhere in the city is the source of the price-drop statistic. The two behaviors are averaged into one citywide number that describes neither.
Inventory framing. As of January 2026, Redmond was operating with less than a 1.3-month supply. Orchard counted 395 homes for sale citywide in June 2026, up 9.1% from a year earlier, with 185 new listings in the prior 30 days. Rising inventory in a supply-constrained market often reads as a shift toward buyers. In Redmond it has coincided with slower absorption of overpriced homes and continued speed on well-positioned ones. The story is selectivity, not softening.
For sellers, the same divergence cuts the other way. A detached home within walking distance of Downtown Redmond Station is being valued against a very short list of recent comparable sales, several of which set new highs. Pricing off the citywide median in that situation leaves money on the table. Pricing off the one or two most recent nearby sales, without accounting for their specific finish level and lot, invites a price reduction.
Is the light rail premium already priced in, or is there more appreciation ahead?
The observed appreciation reflects the 12 months since the May 2025 opening. The full 2 Line, connecting the Eastside to the 1 Line in Seattle, only completed on March 28, 2026, meaning a majority of the current transaction history predates the one-seat ride to Seattle. Whether additional appreciation follows depends on ridership stabilizing and on how quickly the Marymoor Village upzone translates into new detached-substitute product.
Does the ZHVI decline mean Southeast Redmond values are actually falling?
The Zillow index and the Redfin three-month median are measuring different pools. ZHVI weights the entire stock including older industrial-adjacent housing. Redfin's median reflects what closed in a specific window. When a small number of newer, station-adjacent homes trade at higher prices while older stock is not moving, the two numbers can diverge for the same neighborhood without either being wrong.
How should a buyer treat the citywide median as a benchmark?
Treat it as a starting point for city-to-city comparison against Bellevue or Sammamish, and stop there. Once you are inside Redmond, the relevant question is which side of the light rail corridor a home sits on, and how walkable the nearest station is. The citywide median tells you very little about what the next comparable sale will look like.
If you are weighing a Redmond purchase or sale and want to understand what your specific block looks like against the two markets embedded in the citywide number, Linda Nelson is available to walk through recent sales, current inventory, and pricing strategy in detail. Let's connect.
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