Which number do you believe?
If you pulled Queen Anne sale data in June 2026, you'd have found two headline stats sitting side by side. The average sale price across the neighborhood: $1.08 million, up 19.8% from the year before. The median sale price for the three months ending that same June 30: $1.0 million, down 8.7% year over year. Same neighborhood. Same window. Two numbers moving in opposite directions by double digits.
This isn't a typo or a data error on anyone's part. It's what happens when a single ZIP code gets asked to describe two housing markets that don't behave the same way. If you're comparing Queen Anne against Ballard, Magnolia, or Capitol Hill using whichever number your portal happens to surface first, you're comparing against a figure that's arguing with itself. And if you're the one pricing a listing, writing an offer, or waiting on an appraisal in Queen Anne right now, that contradiction isn't academic. It's the exact spot where deals get bumpy.
The three months where the average and the median stopped agreeing
Averages and medians measure different things, and Queen Anne in mid-2026 is a clean illustration of why that distinction matters. The average gets pulled by whatever sold at the extremes. A handful of high-end hilltop closings can drag the average up even while the bulk of transactions are getting cheaper. The median ignores the extremes entirely and just reports the middle of the pack, the price where half of sales landed above and half below.
What makes Queen Anne's June 2026 numbers worth sitting with is that sales volume barely moved. 143 homes sold in June 2026, the same count as June 2025. The market didn't go quiet. What changed was the pace and the mix: homes are now averaging 21 days to go under contract, compared with 8 days a year earlier. Buyers are still there. They're just not sprinting the way they were, and what's closing looks different from what closed twelve months ago.
That's the tell. When a neighborhood's median and average diverge by this much in the same window, it's rarely a real 8.7% loss of value. It's a signal that the composition of what sold shifted, more of one housing type this year, less of another, and a blended neighborhood-wide statistic can't tell you which.
The hill that built two different housing stocks
Queen Anne has a physical reason for this split, and it's been there since before any of the current price data existed. The city's own Queen Anne neighborhood plan documents a historic streetcar system called the Counterbalance, an electric trolley line that used an underground counterweight to help vehicles climb the steep grade between the flats near Seattle Center and the top of the hill. The mechanism is still there, buried under Queen Anne Avenue, no longer in use but never removed.
That grade is why Queen Anne isn't one housing market wearing one ZIP code. Down near Seattle Center and Climate Pledge Arena, in what residents call Uptown or Lower Queen Anne, the terrain is flatter and the zoning has long supported denser buildings: apartments, condos, the occasional mixed-use development a short walk from the Metropolitan Market. Climb the hill and the lots widen out into single-family blocks, the kind with a Craftsman on a corner lot near Kerry Park and a view of the skyline that the Counterbalance trolley used to work so hard to reach.
Two different grades produced two different products. And when a housing report averages Uptown's condo stock against Upper Queen Anne's single-family stock into one "Queen Anne" line, it's blending a $450,000 product with a $1.35 million one and reporting the result as if it describes either.
What the segments actually look like
Pulling the sub-areas apart tells a more coherent story than the blended number does.
| Segment | Recent price signal | What it's telling you |
|---|---|---|
| Upper Queen Anne single-family | Median $1,357,500 over the trailing six months (median size 2,290 sq ft) | The hilltop craftsman and view-lot market, largely unchanged in character |
| West Queen Anne | Zillow home value $1,130,333, up 0.8% year over year as of mid-2026; list price averaging $712 per square foot against roughly $537 citywide | Commands a real premium per square foot, tracking closely to Kerry Park's view corridor |
| East Queen Anne | Zillow home value $1,090,885, down 2.2% over the year as of July 2026 | Softening slightly, likely the segment absorbing the slower 21-day pace |
| North Queen Anne | Reported median $1,185,000 in a recent 30-day window, up 35.4% year over year | Based on just 2 sales, down from 17 in the same window a year earlier |
| Uptown / Lower Queen Anne condos | 115 active listings, median list $449,000, averaging 74 days on market and 2 offers | The affordable entry point, and the slowest-moving segment right now |
| Queen Anne townhomes | 30 active listings, median list $932,000, averaging 44 days on market and 5 offers | The hybrid product, and the one drawing the most competition |
Look at that table sideways and the "one Queen Anne" median starts to look less like a fact and more like an average of two different conversations.
Why North Queen Anne's 35% jump isn't real growth
The North Queen Anne figure deserves its own line because it's a textbook case of a number that's technically accurate and practically misleading. A 35.4% year-over-year jump sounds like a submarket on fire. But it's built on 2 closed sales in the most recent 30-day window, against 17 in the same window a year prior. Two sales can be two unusually large homes, two remodeled properties, or two lucky comps. It tells you almost nothing about where the next home in North Queen Anne will actually price, because the sample is too thin to average anything meaningfully.
This is worth remembering any time a neighborhood report leads with a big percentage move. Ask how many transactions sit underneath it. A citywide or even a full-Queen-Anne median resting on 143 sales is a real statistic. A sub-neighborhood median resting on 2 is a coin flip wearing a percentage sign.
The comp problem this creates at the appraisal desk
Here's where this stops being a curiosity and starts affecting an actual transaction. Appraisers and buyers' lenders pull comparable sales from the same general area code, and Queen Anne's blended geography makes it easy to end up with a comp set that mixes segments that shouldn't be mixed. A 1,200-square-foot Uptown condo two blocks from Seattle Center is not a comp for a 2,290-square-foot craftsman on the hill, even if both sit inside the same neighborhood boundary on a map. Pull three condo comps into an appraisal for a hilltop single-family listing, or the reverse, and the number that comes back can undershoot or overshoot the real value by a meaningful margin.
If you're selling on Upper Queen Anne, it's worth confirming with your agent that any appraisal or CMA comp set is filtered to single-family sales in your specific sub-area, not the neighborhood at large. If you're buying a condo in Uptown, the same logic protects you from a comp set inflated by hillside sales that have nothing to do with your unit. This is a five-minute conversation before an offer goes in, and it's the difference between a valuation you can defend and one that gets challenged mid-escrow.
What actually moved: townhomes are the tell
If you want the one number that best explains where Queen Anne's real demand is sitting right now, it's the townhome segment. Thirty townhomes on the market, a median list price of $932,000, 44 days to contract, and an average of 5 offers per listing. Compare that to condos, sitting an average of 74 days and drawing 2 offers, or the broader blended neighborhood figure of one offer on the general home stock.
Townhomes are the product built for a buyer priced out of the hilltop single-family stock but unwilling to settle for a condo's shared walls and shared building decisions. They're new enough to avoid the maintenance questions that come with 1920s craftsman wiring, and they sit closer to the yard-adjacent, private-entry feel that move-up buyers are actually shopping for. The five-offer average says that's exactly the buyer showing up in Queen Anne this year, and it's a segment none of the blended headline numbers capture on their own.
The takeaway
Queen Anne's single median price for mid-2026 isn't wrong. It's just not describing one market. It's averaging a hilltop single-family segment holding firm near $1.35 million against a condo segment sitting closer to $450,000 and taking more than two months to sell, with a townhome segment in between pulling real competition. Anyone comparing Queen Anne to another Seattle neighborhood, or pricing a listing inside it, gets a clearer answer by asking which side of the old Counterbalance line their property sits on before trusting the headline number at all.
If you're weighing a move into or out of Queen Anne and want the segment-level read instead of the blended one, the team at Mr Magnolia can walk through what your specific block, lot, and product type are actually doing right now. Get a free home valuation and get the number that's built for your address, not the whole hill.