Pull up two different price trackers for Bothell this month and you'll walk away with two different homes in your head. One says values are down about 8.6 percent from a year ago. Another says the median sale price has fallen closer to 14.6 percent over roughly the same stretch. Neither number is wrong. They're just each describing a different slice of a city that is currently behaving like two separate markets wearing one zip code.
I talk to buyers every week who've done their homework before we ever get on a call, and the ones shopping Bothell almost always arrive confused in the same specific way. They've seen a headline that says the market is cooling, then toured a new townhome in the high $1.5 millions with a line out the sales office door. Both things are true. They're just not describing the same market.
The Same City, Two Different Headlines
As of February 2026, closed-sale data from the regional MLS put Bothell's median at $1.076 million, down 14.6 percent from February 2025. Zillow's home value index for the same window showed the city down closer to 8.6 percent year over year. Redfin's numbers land somewhere in between: a median sale price of $999,000 over the three months ending in May 2026, down 13.1 percent from the same period a year earlier, with homes taking an average of 10 days to sell compared to 6 days the year before.
Three legitimate sources, three different percentages, all measuring the same city in the same rough window. That's not measurement error. It's a sign that the "median" is smoothing over two markets that are moving in opposite directions, and each data provider happens to be catching a slightly different mix of the two.
What's Actually Sitting in North Creek Right Now
The mechanism behind the gap has a name, and it's not subtle once you know where to look: North Creek. This corridor in the eastern part of Bothell has become the center of gravity for new construction in the city, and it's currently seeing closings in the $1.5 million to $1.7 million range that pull the citywide median upward even as older subdivisions soften underneath it.
D.R. Horton is the most active builder working in Bothell right now, but the North Creek pipeline runs wider than any single company. Elmbrook, a 98-homesite community in the Northshore School District, is placing modern townhomes near its entrance for first-time buyers and larger single-family plans deeper into the neighborhood. Coyote Woods, a 19-home collection of modern farmhouse-style builds from Harbour Homes, sits in the same North Creek footprint. MSR Communities has been closing out Shelton Grove with east-facing lots priced around $403 per square foot, marketed as the lowest new-construction price per square foot in the area. Closer to downtown, Arborstone and the soon-to-launch 9 on Filbert are adding boutique townhome inventory within walking distance of Bothell's Main Street corridor, while Tambark15 is bringing modern townhomes with a community playground to the broader North Creek footprint.
Homes in this corridor were mostly built between 2015 and 2026, which means they carry open floor plans, smaller lots, and a suburban-new character that reads differently from Bothell's older, more established streets. When several of these newer, higher-priced units close in the same month, they don't just add data points. They shift the citywide median enough to mask what's happening one neighborhood over.
A citywide median in a market like this isn't an average of similar homes. It's an average of two different products getting sold to two different buyers, reported as if they were one number.
What Resale Looks Like With Construction Taken Out
Strip the North Creek closings out of the picture and the resale side of Bothell tells a quieter story. Established neighborhoods closer to downtown and toward the southern edge of the city, where inventory skews older, have been softening for most of 2026. Days on market have stretched out compared to a year ago. Redfin logged 144 homes sold in Bothell in May 2026, down from 155 the year before, alongside that jump from 6 to 10 average days on market. That's not a market in freefall, but it's a market where sellers no longer get to assume a bidding war just because the address says Bothell.
Homes that have sat for 30 days or more have become the most negotiation-friendly segment in the city. That's a useful signal for buyers focused on resale rather than new construction, because it tells you where sellers still anchored to 2024 comparables are the ones most open to a real conversation about price.
The Gap Between the Sign in the Yard and the Number You'll Actually Pay
New construction adds a second layer of confusion that resale buyers don't have to think about: the base price on the sign is rarely the price you'll pay to move in. Most builder base prices reflect a stripped package, and finish selections at the design center, flooring, countertops, appliances, and upgraded fixtures, can add anywhere from $50,000 to $200,000 or more to the final number.
That matters directly for the median conversation, because a $1.5 million North Creek closing might include tens of thousands of dollars in selections that a resale buyer would have gotten included, or would have negotiated down, in an older home. Builders also tend to be more flexible on upgrade credits, closing cost contributions, and rate buydowns than they are on the base price itself, especially in the final phases of a community or when a builder is sitting on standing inventory. Knowing which lever a specific builder is willing to pull, and which ones they won't budge on, is often worth more to a buyer's final cost than the sticker price they walked in with.
So Which Bothell Are You Actually Looking At?
If you're comparing new construction in North Creek to a resale listing near downtown, you're not making an apples-to-apples comparison even when the addresses are two miles apart. A North Creek buyer is paying for smaller lot sizes, current building codes, and a genuinely new floor plan, and should expect the base price to move once design-center selections get added in. A resale buyer in one of Bothell's older neighborhoods is negotiating against a softer market, longer average days on market, and sellers who are increasingly willing to talk about price if the home has already sat for a few weeks.
Neither position is better. They're just different enough that a single citywide median can't responsibly describe both, and treating it as though it can is how buyers end up either overpaying for a resale home priced off last year's comps, or underestimating what a new build will actually cost once the design center bill arrives.
A Few Questions Worth Answering Directly
Does it matter which county side of Bothell I'm buying on? It does, at least for your ongoing tax bill. Bothell straddles the King and Snohomish county line, and property tax rates differ by side. Snohomish County parcels have generally run in the 1.0 to 1.1 percent range, while King County parcels have tended to sit slightly lower, around 0.9 to 1.0 percent. On a home near the median price, that difference works out to a few thousand dollars a year, which is worth confirming before you fall in love with a specific street.
Is this a good time to buy resale in Bothell? If you're comparing it to the frenzy of a few years ago, yes. Longer days on market and a growing pool of listings that have sat past 30 days mean more room to negotiate on price, contingencies, and timeline than resale buyers have had in a while.
Will North Creek keep pulling the median up? As long as builders keep closing higher-priced inventory there faster than the resale side of the city can offset it, yes, the citywide number will keep looking stronger than what a typical resale seller is actually experiencing. That's exactly why the citywide figure is the wrong number to negotiate against if your home isn't in that corridor.
If you're trying to figure out whether your Bothell address falls on the new-construction side of this split or the resale side, and what that means for pricing your own sale or structuring an offer, I'd rather walk through your specific street with you than let a headline number make that call for you. Jenell Steltz works Bothell's resale and new-construction markets side by side every week, and request your free home valuation & seller strategy is the fastest way to find out which Bothell you're actually standing in.
