Every month I publish a Seattle market update, and every month I have to add the same caveat to the Southeast Seattle section: about 35 to 40 houses close here in a month, so a single month's median moves on whichever handful happened to sell. An 8% swing on 35 sales is arithmetic, not information.
This is the fix. A quarter gives 112 house sales instead of 35, which is enough to say something. So here is the third quarter for Southeast Seattle, covering Mt. Baker, Columbia City, Beacon Hill, Seward Park, Hillman City and Rainier Beach, plus a neighborhood-by-neighborhood breakdown and an honest account of why those smaller numbers disagree with each other.
The Quarter, Area-Wide
These are NWMLS figures for the area as a whole, residential only, July through September.
| Measure | Q3 2026 | Q3 2025 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Houses closed | 112 | 135 | down 17% |
| New listings | 257 | 241 | up 7% |
| Homes going pending | 147 | 166 | down 11% |
| Active listings, end of September | 150 | 119 | up 26% |
The shape of that is consistent and easy to read. More homes came to market, fewer went under contract, and the unsold balance grew. Supply ended the quarter at 2.5 months against 2.2 a year earlier.
The within-quarter path is worth seeing, because it was not a straight line. Monthly medians ran $818,000 in July, $792,000 in August, and $780,000 in September. Months of supply went 2.7, then spiked to 4.0 in August, then settled back to 2.5. That August spike was the only time this year Southeast Seattle touched the four-month line that marks a buyer's market, and it did not hold.
For the steadiest number available, go to the year rather than the quarter. Across the first nine months of 2026, the monthly medians here averaged $817,000, down about 5% from the same stretch of 2025, on 359 closed sales against 363. That is the figure I would quote if someone asked me what happened to Southeast Seattle home values this year: down roughly 5%, on essentially flat volume.
Neighborhood by Neighborhood
This is the part nobody else publishes, and the part that needs the most explanation. NWMLS reports Southeast Seattle as one area, so neighborhood detail has to come from Redfin, which draws its own boundaries and updates each neighborhood on its own schedule. Here is where each one stood at the time of writing, across all home types.
| Neighborhood | Median sale price | Year over year | Window | Homes sold that month |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Seward Park | $996,721 | up 7.8% | 3 months to September | 24 |
| Mt. Baker | $899,950 | down 15.9% | 3 months to August | 29 |
| Beacon Hill | $754,788 | up 6.3% | 3 months to September | 73 |
| Columbia City | $724,772 | down 15.6% | 3 months to September | 39 |
| Rainier Beach | $722,750 | down 3.1% | 3 months to August | 16 |
| Hillman City | $635,000 | down 26.6% | most recent reported | 5 |
Othello is missing from that table because Redfin does not report it as its own neighborhood. Sales around the station generally surface under Brighton, and the blocks south of it under Dunlap, which is one reason the Othello guide leans on the station and the housing stock rather than on a headline median.
Why Those Numbers Disagree
Look at that table again. Mt. Baker is down 16% and Beacon Hill is up 6%. Columbia City is down 16% and Seward Park is up 8%. These are adjacent neighborhoods in the same quarter of the same market, and they cannot all be true as statements about what homes are worth.
Three things explain most of it, and none of them is a real divergence in value.
Sample size is the biggest. Hillman City's figure rests on five sales. Rainier Beach's rests on sixteen. At those counts, one unusual house moves the median by six figures, and the year-over-year percentage becomes nearly meaningless. Only Beacon Hill, at 73 sales, has a sample I would treat as sturdy on its own.
Mix is the second. An all-home-types median mixes detached houses with townhomes and condos, so a quarter heavy on new townhomes drags the number down even if every detached house held its value. The neighborhoods with the most new attached construction are the ones where this distortion is largest.
Timing is the third, and it is the one most people never notice. Redfin updates neighborhoods on different schedules. Four of these are current through September, which genuinely is Q3. Mt. Baker and Rainier Beach are a month behind, through August. Hillman City's page does not state a clean window at all. So part of what looks like Mt. Baker underperforming Beacon Hill is simply the two being measured over different three-month stretches.
What the table is actually good for is ranking, not change. The price ladder across Southeast Seattle, Seward Park at the top, then Mt. Baker, then Beacon Hill and Columbia City in the middle, then Rainier Beach and Hillman City, is stable across quarters and matches what I see in practice. The year-over-year column is where I would stop reading.
What It Means If You Live Here
For sellers, the area-wide quarter says what the monthly updates have been saying all year: this is still the tightest part of the county, and it is loosening slowly rather than breaking. Supply at 2.5 months remains well inside the neutral band, and Southeast Seattle has not spent a single month this year in genuine buyer's-market territory except August's brief touch of 4.0. What has changed is that buyers have 26% more to look at than a year ago, which shows up as time rather than price. My guide to what your Seattle home is worth covers how to set a number in a market like this one, and the short version is that the first asking price is doing more work than it used to.
For buyers, the useful read is that the neighborhood you are shopping matters less to your negotiating position than the individual listing does. The spread in those neighborhood medians is mostly measurement, not opportunity. What is real is the extra inventory and the extra time, and those exist across all six neighborhoods roughly equally.
For anyone deciding whether to believe a number they read about their own block: ask how many sales it rests on. If the answer is under about twenty, it is a starting point for a conversation rather than a finding.
Methodology
Area-wide figures are NWMLS data for Southeast Seattle, residential only, as compiled by Windermere for periods through September 2026. Neighborhood figures are Redfin's medians across all home types, with each one's window and sale count stated in the table because they are not uniform. The two sources draw different boundaries and count different property types, so the area-wide and neighborhood numbers are not meant to reconcile, and I would not add them up or average them together.
For the month-by-month view, the September update has Seattle, the Eastside and King County alongside this area. If you want to know what your specific house is worth rather than what the quarter did, reach out and I will put a number on it using the comparable sales that actually apply to your block, which is a different and more useful exercise than any of the medians above.