Three portals are telling three different stories about Sammamish home prices this year, and the gap between them is wider than a rounding error. Redfin's three-month median sale price this spring sat at $1.6 million, down 4.9 percent from a year earlier. Zillow's home value index put the typical Sammamish home at $1,461,158 as of the end of June 2026, down 12.7 percent. Movoto's own August 2026 snapshot showed a median list price of $1.49 million, down 7 percent from the same month last year. Even Redfin disagrees with itself: its average sale price for last month alone was down just 0.64 percent year over year, a fraction of the 4.9 percent drop it reports over a rolling three-month window.
A headline that says "Sammamish prices fell 12 percent" and one that says "Sammamish prices fell less than 1 percent" cannot both describe the same static market. They can both describe the same shifting one. What changed this year in Sammamish isn't how much any individual home is worth. It's what's being sold at all.
What actually hit the market this summer
This July, the first for-sale homes inside Sammamish's long-planned Town Center went on the market. Parkside, built by Terrene Homes at the corner of 222nd Place SE and SE 4th Street, is offering 38 townhomes across four floor plans, starting at $1,499,900 for a 2,148-square-foot unit and topping out at $2,199,900 for 3,002 square feet. Three of the homes will sell at subsidized prices to meet the city's affordable housing requirement. Terrene, a Bellevue-based builder founded in 2007, has completed more than 800 homes across Woodinville, Sammamish, and Kirkland, so this isn't an unproven crew learning the market on the job.
TerraLuxe follows this fall, roughly 45 more townhomes a few blocks over from Taylor Morrison, a builder with prior communities in Kirkland and Redmond.
Together, that's about 83 new attached homes entering closed-sale data over a matter of months, in a city where new construction inside Town Center had barely registered for nearly two decades. Since the Town Center plan was first adopted in 2008, the city added more than 3,500 homes elsewhere, almost all large single-family lots, while barely 300 homes were built inside the plan area itself. Attached housing wasn't a rounding error in Sammamish. It was close to zero. Adding 83 units of it in one stretch is enough to visibly bend a citywide median even if not one existing homeowner's equity moved a dollar.
That is the mechanism behind the disagreeing portals. Each one samples a slightly different window and a slightly different mix of closed sales, active listings, and list prices. When a chunk of that mix suddenly includes brand-new townhomes priced below the traditional Plateau resale, the average moves. Zillow's longer look-back window catches more of that shift. Redfin's tighter monthly average catches less of it. Neither is wrong. They're measuring different slices of a market that is, for the first time, actually two markets.
The pipeline behind the number
The scale of what's coming matters more than any single month's closing. In a July 2025 vote, the Sammamish City Council moved 6-1 to raise the Town Center's housing target from 2,000 units to 4,000, shifting the zoning code toward a form-based approach that trades a fixed unit count for flexible building forms within height limits. That decision followed an earlier council directive in April 2025 to stop considering building heights above 85 feet, which had briefly been on the table.
Matthew Samwick, CEO of Innovation Realty Partners, the developer behind the bulk of the Town Center's initial phases, has been careful to temper expectations about how fast this arrives. "The idea that thousands of housing units will appear overnight, or in a short time period, is completely false," he told the Sammamish Independent last year. His company's initial two phases were planned, as of spring 2025, to include the 83 townhomes now delivering plus roughly 640 apartment units, including a Merrill Gardens senior living facility, and about 100,000 square feet of commercial space along Southeast 4th Street.
Separately, Aegis Living is planning a 95-to-100-unit senior and memory care facility near Metropolitan Market, which a company official said could break ground in the first quarter of 2026 depending on materials costs and broader market conditions. A second, larger apartment and mixed-use building, 344 units across seven stories, was still working through city review as of last summer. A city planner told the Sammamish Independent at the time that permitting alone can take over a year once construction drawings are finalized, which is a useful reality check for anyone assuming the rest of Town Center shows up on a single timeline.
None of this is settled the way a finished subdivision is settled. The council that raised the unit cap in July 2025 looks different today. Three new members, Debbie Treen, Josh Amato, and Michael Boyer, won seats that November on a ballot that drew 45.94 percent turnout, the second-highest in a decade for a city council race here. Housing capacity and the pace of Town Center construction were explicit fault lines in that election. Whatever number gets built out over the next several years will be shaped by a council that voters only recently reshaped.
What this means depending on what you're buying
If you're comparing Sammamish's median price to Redmond's or Issaquah's as a shorthand for which city is "hotter," ask what's actually in each sample first. A city that just added 83 new attached homes to its closed-sale data is going to move differently than one where the housing mix hasn't changed in years. The comparison isn't wrong. It's just measuring something more specific than "Sammamish" as a single idea.
If you already own a large-lot home on the Plateau or in a neighborhood like Trossachs and you're weighing when to sell, the citywide decline headlines have limited bearing on your actual comp set. A quarter-acre resale is still being evaluated against other quarter-acre resales by anyone who understands the market, regardless of what a townhome three miles away just closed for. Pull comps from your specific lot type and square footage before reacting to a number that may not describe your product at all.
If you're weighing a purchase inside Parkside or TerraLuxe, understand your early comps will be thin for a while, likely the same builder, same phase, same street. Your home's resale value over the next several years will depend less on today's citywide median and more on how the still-undesigned remainder of the 4,000-unit plan actually gets built, and on whether the council in office when your building is complete keeps that target intact.
Buyers moving into a phased, master-planned community like this one should also budget for a period of visible construction nearby, since the underground stormwater infrastructure funded by the developers, a $5.2 million regional vault, was slated to be finished before spring 2026, and additional phases were still moving through permitting as recently as last year. That's a real trade-off worth weighing against the appeal of walking to Sammamish Commons, the 30-acre civic hub with the Community and Aquatic Center, the library, and the YMCA, or to Metropolitan Market, all of which are already in place today.
A few questions worth asking before you write an offer
Does new construction in Town Center pull down resale values for existing Plateau homes? Not directly. It changes what the citywide average is measuring by adding a different, generally lower-price product into the mix. It doesn't change what a buyer will pay for a comparable large-lot resale, which is still priced against other large-lot resales.
Is 4,000 units a hard ceiling on how big Town Center gets? It's the target the council adopted in July 2025, but the plan and code updates were still being finalized into this year, and the council itself changed after the November 2025 election. Treat it as the number being planned around right now rather than a permanent limit.
How long should I expect construction activity near a Town Center purchase? Longer than a single season. City staff told the Sammamish Independent that permitting the second major phase alone could take over a year once drawings are done, and that's before construction begins. Anyone timing a move around a fully built-out Town Center should plan in years, not months.
A median price is a useful shorthand until the thing it's measuring changes shape underneath it. Right now in Sammamish, it has. Whether that matters for your specific move depends entirely on which side of that shape you're standing on, and that's a conversation worth having with someone who's been tracking both sides of it closely.
Mari Moline works with buyers and sellers across Bellevue, Sammamish, and the greater Eastside. Schedule your VIP consultation to talk through what these two Sammamish markets actually mean for your next move.
