Best to Worst: How Median Home Prices Stacked Up Across These Nine Communities This Summer

Twelve weeks. Nine communities. One question worth asking plainly: where did home prices run highest, and where did they run lowest?

Rank every community across the twelve weeks ending August 30, 2026 by its median sold price, and the spread is the story. At one end, a typical sale ran past ten million dollars. At the other end, a typical sale in this same report landed under three million dollars. Same window, same broader market, very different worlds.

Across the full territory, the median sold price for the period was $2,810,000, on a median of 35 days from listing to sale, according to MLS sold data. That's a real shift from a year earlier, when the same window ran a median of 26 days. Sellers also held a little more leverage at the table: the median sale-to-list ratio came in at 101.2%, compared with 100.1% in the same window a year earlier.

Now the ranking.

Atherton sits alone at the top. Its median sold price for the period was $11,775,000, by far the highest figure anywhere in this report.

A wide gap down, Portola Valley comes next, with a median sold price of $4,950,000. That figure is up about 38% from a year earlier, which sounds like an unambiguous win for sellers there. It isn't quite that simple. Over the same period, the average sale-to-list ratio in Portola Valley fell by about 8 percentage points. Homes are fetching more there, and sellers are conceding more to get there. Rising prices and rising concessions, in the same community, at the same time.

Los Altos follows, with one of its two ZIPs posting a median sold price of $4,930,000, among the highest anywhere in this ranking.

Saratoga comes next, with a median sold price of $4,162,500.

Palo Alto is where the ranking gets complicated. One ZIP there posted a median sold price of $3,432,500. Elsewhere within Palo Alto, prices ran far lower, with one ZIP's median down by more than half compared with a year earlier. One name, two very different markets, inside the same twelve weeks.

Menlo Park's median sold price came in at $3,225,000.

Redwood City's highest ZIP posted a median sold price of $3,137,500, though that single figure hides real variation from one part of the community to the next.

Cupertino's median sold price ran at $2,850,000.

And Mountain View closes out this ranking. Its highest ZIP posted a median sold price of $2,800,000, landing almost exactly on the territory's own overall median for the period.

What does a list like this actually tell a homeowner? Not much about what any single house is worth. A median moves with whatever happened to sell in that particular window, not with the value of any one property. What it does tell you is where buyer competition concentrated, and where it didn't, across nine very different communities inside one buy box.

If you're selling in one of the communities near the top of this list, the twelve weeks behind you look like a sellers' window, and the territory-wide sale-to-list data backs that up. If you're searching in one of the communities lower down, or in a lower-priced pocket of a higher-priced name like Palo Alto or Redwood City, you likely had more room to negotiate than the headline figure for that name suggests. Portola Valley is the clearest reminder that a rising median and a more favorable market for sellers don't always move together.

What's worth watching from here is simple: whether the gap between the communities at the top of this list and the ones at the bottom keeps widening, or starts to close. The territory's median sale-to-list ratio, still just above 101%, is the first place to look for that answer next time the data comes in.