When is the best time to list your home for sale in 2026?

When is the best time to list your home for sale in 2026?

Strategic timing is the key to a successful sale, but neighborhood trends are constantly shifting. Check out our best time to list report to see exactly when to list for the best results.

We have run detailed reports for: neighborhoods like Trossachs, Klahanie, The Issaquah Highlands, Sammamish as a whole, Issaquah, Bellevue and even out to Snoqualmie Ridge.

In the greater East Side real estate market, prices usually peak in spring, but many sellers miss this window because they list their homes too late. Since prices are based on closed home sales, we need to consider the number of new listings affecting supply, typical market time, and the closing timeline. Sellers aiming for peak pricing should list their homes early enough to account for these factors. Of course, we cannot predict the future, but we can look back at 2025’s market activity and pricing trends, which may provide insight into peak pricing. Activity and trends vary by neighborhood, so we analyzed several of our favorite communities and present them here.

Click here to see the exact neighborhood charts for your area.

These price variations can be very nuanced from neighborhood to neighborhood even within the same city.

In some cases, just one month can mean a difference of hundreds of thousands of dollars. So, if you are planning on selling it may not necessarily be worth trying to “Time” the market for the end of school. Especially if closing in April instead of June means an extra $200,000 or more!

Take for example the neighborhood of Trossachs located in Sammamish. Trossachs has just under 1,700 homes.

The Trossachs market started the year in January with a median selling price of $1,838,700 and ended the year at $1,713,680 but that isn’t the FULL story.

I sold 26624 SE 15th ST, Sammamish, WA 98075 in May for $2,500,000. We went live in early March.

While over the course of the year home median home prices in Trossachs dropped $120,000…. There was a “Best time to list which was in February and March with those homes achieving the highest sales prices of the year.

If you tried timing the listing of your home for the end of June to coincide with the end of the typical school year, you more than likely closed in the August-September time frame which was a median price of only $1,689,647 which is almost $150,000 below the yearly starting point.

That same sales pattern can be seen around the area from neighborhoods like Klahanie, The Issaquah Highlands, Sammamish as a whole, Issaquah, Bellevue and even out to Snoqualmie Ridge.

For 2026 we are starting the year with the highest level of inventory in 15 years. What that means for the seller out there is that the market will peak earlier this year than last. In fact, by April-May we are expected to hit the highest level of active inventory in the Puget Sound area’s history.

Those conditions lead to the following.

• The housing market will face increased competition in 2026.
• Expectations are for approximately a 5% decrease in prices for 2026.
• Homebuying activity should pick up after a long slump but with rates around 6% and lots of inventory it won’t be enough to lift prices.
• Housing Inventory will hit all time high levels by April-May.
• Bidding Wars will be replaced with MULTIPLE price drops or corrections.
• Interest rates are to bounce around the 6% range.

NOW is ABSOLUTELY the best time!

We all know that home sellers have had the upper hand for several years, but those days are behind us, and though the market has slowed, there are still buyers out there. The difference now is that higher mortgage rates and lower affordability are limiting how much buyers can pay for a home.

Because of this, I expect listing prices to pull back further in the coming year, which will make accurate pricing more important than ever when selling a home. 

In the greater Seattle area  I expect somewhere between 3% to 5% continued drop. (That should be noted as a 5% drop from where homes actually sell and NOT from where they are currently priced.)

“As a side note remember we saw some areas literally increase by 100% in a single year during the pandemic. This is just getting things back to normal”

For the overall greater Seattle area, home list prices rose 40.6% in just over two years’ time

So, a 10%, 15%, or even 20% drop over a two-year span isn’t as significant as it might seem at first. We are just adjusting back to where they would have been if we had maintained the “Normal” 5-8% appreciation considered sustainable.

So, what does “Housing Affordability” mean for sellers in 2026?

To be blunt. The sales price of your home is going to go down.

That doesn’t mean home prices are going to crash, but it does mean that along with moderating interest rates, governmental pressure is going to be on flattening to slightly decreasing the price you can sell your home for.

A new analysis from the Realtor.com® economic research team considers what it would take to restore home affordability to 2019 levels, when the typical mortgage payment was about 21% of the median household income, compared with more than 30% today. The analysis finds it would take:

• Mortgage rates falling to 2.65%, down from 6.15% currently, or
• Incomes rising 56%to a median of $132,171, up from $84,763 currently, or
• Home prices falling 35%to a median of $397,963 in King County, down from $612,250 last year.

NOW is ABSOLUTELY the best time!

High mortgage rates, sweeping layoffs and economic uncertainty made buyers cautious, leaving the region with more homes for sale than usual and some listings lingering. Home sales were down slightly through the first eleven months of 2025 compared to the same period in 2024, according to Northwest Multiple Listing Service data.

Going into 2026, sellers will have to continue competing for attention by cutting prices or accepting lower offers, Tucker said.

All of that being said, we have been in this trend for more than six (6) months now with prices steadily moving lower across the area. 2026 is one of the few years where the starting median home price is most neighborhoods is BELOW where it started the year before (2025 in this case).