Why Fremont's Home Prices Don't Agree With Each Other Right Now

Four buildings sit at 501, 551, 601 and 651 N. 34th Street in Fremont, still holding Google employees at desks most weekdays. In 2025, the company confirmed it would eventually empty them out, shifting its Seattle workforce to the South Lake Union campus across the water. No firm date has been attached to that move. The lease notices haven't specified when the last badge will scan out.

A few blocks from those buildings, the neighborhood's housing market is doing something almost as hard to pin down. Pull three separate reports on Fremont home prices from this year and you won't just get three different numbers. You'll get three different stories about which direction the market is moving. That's not noise from sloppy data collection. It's the surface signal of a real split running underneath Fremont's housing stock, and understanding it matters more than memorizing any single median.

The Median That Isn't Reporting the Same Thing Twice

Start with one source. Over the three months ending May 2026, the median sale price for a Fremont home came in at $950,000, essentially flat against the year before, up two-hundredths of a percent. A separate reading pulled from the same data provider put the average Fremont house price at $1.01 million, up 12.5 percent year over year. Same neighborhood, same month, two numbers moving in opposite directions.

That gap isn't a mistake. A median tells you what the middle sale looked like. An average gets pulled upward by whichever expensive houses happened to close, even if the typical sale barely budged. When a handful of higher-end properties trade in a given stretch, the average jumps while the median holds still. Both numbers are accurate. They're just answering different questions.

Zillow's home value estimate adds a third layer. As of June 30, 2026, it put the average Fremont home value at $894,769, down 2.1 percent over the year. That figure isn't built from closed sales at all. It's a modeled estimate across the entire housing stock, including homes that never went on the market. Comparing it directly to a sold-price median is comparing two different instruments, not confirming or contradicting either one.

Two more readings from the spring narrow the range without resolving the disagreement. In April 2026, one tracker put the median list price at $912,000, down slightly from the prior month and down about 1 percent from a year earlier. Around the same time, another put the median home price at $935,000, with a trailing twelve month median sale price of $912,500, up 2 percent year over year. Sources measuring similar things over similar windows landing within two or three percent of each other is normal. The real divide opens once you stop averaging Fremont's homes together and start separating what's actually for sale.

A January 2026 snapshot of Fremont's active listings found only 5 single-family homes and 8 condos for sale at once, out of 24 total listings. That's not a market with room to negotiate on the house side. It's a market where almost nothing is available to negotiate over.

Where Fremont Sits Inside Seattle's New Buyer's Market

Seattle entered September 2026 with resale inventory above four months for the first time since January 2012, based on regional MLS tracking, a threshold the city hasn't crossed in more than fourteen years. That's the headline showing up across market updates right now, and it's accurate at the city level. It also flattens a lot of variation that matters once you're shopping a specific neighborhood.

The same inventory tracking breaks Seattle down by price band. Below $350,000, supply runs about 8.1 months, the loosest reading in the city. Between $750,000 and $1.5 million, supply tightens to roughly three months, the city's tightest band, paired with what the report labels "Strong" buyer activity. Push into the $1.5 million to $2 million range and supply climbs back to about four months. Above $2 million, it loosens again.

Fremont's single-family houses, priced from about $1.1 million into the high $1.9 millions, sit inside or right at the edge of that tightest citywide band. Fremont's condos, running from $325,000 up through the low $900,000s, span the loosest bottom tier and the more moderate middle. A buyer shopping Fremont houses right now is stepping into the slice of the Seattle market still behaving like a seller's market. A buyer shopping Fremont condos is stepping into the slice cooling fastest citywide.

Northwest MLS data for August 2026 puts the citywide single-family median somewhere between $953,000 and $957,500, depending on which reporting cutoff you use, against a condo and townhome median of $606,325. That's close to a $350,000 gap between the two property types at the city level. Fremont compresses the same gap into a smaller footprint, but it doesn't erase it.

What Google Leaving Actually Changes, and What It Doesn't

It's tempting to connect Google's departure straight to the softer half of Fremont's market. Condos draw more of the younger, tech-adjacent buyer and renter pool the campus has fed for years. Pete Hanning, executive director of the Fremont Chamber of Commerce, told reporters in 2025 that Fremont remains "a highly desirable tech hub" and that efforts were underway to bring in replacement tenants. Adobe, Salesforce's Tableau, Nvidia through its OctoAI acquisition, and Brinc Drones all still operate in the neighborhood. Google's exit was described as gradual and long-term, without a confirmed completion date, and the most recent reporting available doesn't show one has been set since.

The single-family side's tightness has a different, slower cause. Fremont's stock of standalone houses on buildable lots barely grows year to year, and turnover among the owners of those houses is rare regardless of which employer leases office space nearby. That five-homes-for-sale snapshot from January reflects a structural shortage, not a temporary dip tied to one company's real estate decision. A departing anchor tenant shapes foot traffic for nearby restaurants and shops well before it shapes what a three-bedroom craftsman with a yard sells for.

If you're comparing Fremont against other options in the northern Seattle corridor, the practical takeaway is knowing which of the two Fremonts your number applies to before you trust it:

• A budget at or above $1.1 million puts you in the tighter single-family band, where the citywide buyer's market headline barely registers on the ground.
• A budget under $935,000 puts you closer to the condo segment, where inventory and days on market track much closer to the citywide loosening.
• Zip-level figures for the 98103 area blend Fremont with neighboring pockets like Wallingford and Phinney Ridge, so a single zip-wide median can understate how tight Fremont's own house inventory is running.

A median price is a starting point, not an answer. Fremont's split between houses and condos this year is wide enough that the same word, median, can describe two very different buying experiences depending on which side of that line your search sits on.

If you're trying to figure out which version of Fremont's market actually applies to your budget, that's worth a direct conversation rather than another portal search. Ryan Hoff can walk through the current single-family and condo comps side by side and tell you plainly which one you're shopping in. Request a Free Home Valuation to start that conversation.