July 11, 2026 · 5 min read
Have You Captured the Premium You Hoped For?
King County's median home is $889,000. The honest math on a decade of gains, equity, estimated selling costs, and what a win already banked is worth.
In June 2026, the median single-family home in King County sold for $889,000. That number comes from the Northwest MLS monthly report. The same report says it is 2.7 percent lower than a year earlier. Hold both facts in your head at once, because together they describe something most coverage misses: prices have eased, and long-time owners are still sitting on the largest gain most of them will ever see.
Market commentary is almost entirely about the future. Where rates are going, where prices are going, what next spring looks like. For an owner who bought years ago, the more useful question points backward: what did you already win, and what is that win worth in actual dollars if you ever collect it?
The win is already on the books
If you bought in King County eight or ten years ago, you did not need to outsmart anyone. You bought a house, lived in it or rented it out, and a decade of regional growth did the heavy lifting. That gain is not hypothetical. It is embedded in what your house would trade for today, even in a softer market.
And the market is softer. Axios reported in June 2026 that Seattle posted the nation's largest home-price drop this spring while inventory surged across King County. The Northwest MLS counted 7,405 active listings in June, up 16.9 percent from a year ago. None of that erases a decade of appreciation. It does mean the gain has stopped compounding the way it used to, which makes this a reasonable moment to measure it.
A decade in four numbers
Here is an illustration. It is not your house, and it is built around the county median rather than any specific property, but the shape of it is the most common ownership story in the region.
Say you bought in 2016 for $500,000 with 20 percent down. Your cash in was $100,000, and you borrowed $400,000.
Today the county median for a single-family home is $889,000. If your house roughly tracked the market, appreciation added about $389,000.
Ten years of payments on a 30-year loan at that era's rates would have retired something like $85,000 of principal, leaving a balance near $315,000.
So the equity is $889,000 minus $315,000: about $574,000. That is nearly six times the cash that went in. Not because of a clever move in year seven. Because of time, leverage, and a region that grew.
Your house is not the median, and your numbers will differ. Maybe you bought earlier and owe less. Maybe you refinanced and pulled cash out along the way. The point of the illustration is not the exact figure. It is that most owners have never actually run this arithmetic on their own property, so the largest asset on their balance sheet is a number they feel rather than know.
What it costs to collect
Equity is not a check. Converting it has costs, and they are worth estimating honestly now rather than discovering at a closing table.
Commission first, because it is the largest and the most misunderstood line: there is no standard rate. Commission is whatever you negotiate with your broker, and what you offer toward the buyer's side is a negotiation too. For this illustration, 5 percent on $889,000 is $44,450.
Then Washington's real estate excise tax, which is graduated the way income tax brackets are. The state charges 1.1 percent on the first $525,000 of the price and 1.28 percent on the portion between $525,000 and $1,525,000. The higher tiers, 2.75 percent and then 3.0 percent, only touch dollars above $1,525,000 and $3,025,000, so a median-priced sale never sees them. On $889,000, the state's share is $5,775 plus $4,659, about $10,434. Most jurisdictions add a 0.5 percent local portion, another $4,445. Call the excise bill $14,879.
Closing costs are the quiet third line: the owner's title policy, escrow fees, recording, prorated property taxes. On a sale this size, roughly $9,000 is a fair planning figure.
Total estimated selling costs: about $68,000. Set against $574,000 of equity, the illustration walks away with roughly $506,000.
Paper gains and working capital
None of this is an argument for selling. Half a million dollars of equity sitting in a house you love, in a neighborhood that fits your life, may be exactly where it belongs. The question is narrower: is that equity working as hard as you did to build it? Inside the house, the $506,000 earns whatever the market adds or subtracts next, and over the past year the county median subtracted 2.7 percent, per NWMLS. For a landlord, the same question shows up as cash flow per dollar of equity, which is the subject of rent it out or sell it.
Notice what this calculation does not require: a forecast. You do not need to predict where prices go next to count a gain that already happened. Forecasts are guesses about the market. This is bookkeeping about your own position, and bookkeeping is the one part of the picture entirely within your control.
A gain you can only guess at is a rumor. A gain you have computed line by line is a decision you are equipped to make, in either direction, including the decision to hold. If you want the full anatomy of that computation, what you would actually walk away with goes through every line. And if you are not sure this is even the season for the question, start with where you are in your real estate journey.
Questions worth sitting with
Are you ready for the long haul, or have you captured the premium you hoped for when you bought?
Is your equity working as hard as you did to build it?
If one of our letters brought you here, your private Property Brief includes a walk-away calculator with your numbers already started: go to sellerradar.io/d and enter the code from the letter. Ten minutes with real numbers beats a year of wondering.
Seller Radar analyzes public-record, property, ownership, and market data to help real-estate professionals identify likely seller opportunities earlier.