Renton Hill Home Prices: A Historic-Pocket Market Snapshot

Renton Hill home prices come with a warning label that most buyers never see. The neighborhood’s published median is $939,000, up 80.6 percent year over year, and a few inches down the same page the same source reports $808,000, down 7.7 percent. Two numbers, one neighborhood, opposite directions.

Both figures rest on two sales. Renton Hill is the small historic pocket rising south and east of downtown Renton, along Renton Avenue South, Cedar Avenue South, and the streets that climb the hill above the valley floor. It closes so few homes per quarter that its statistics stop behaving like statistics.

The Rache Team has spent more than 26 years guiding Renton families toward wealth and homeownership, and this hill holds some of the most distinctive housing in the city. This snapshot lays out what Renton Hill home prices actually look like right now, why the published numbers contradict each other, and what the closings themselves reveal about a genuinely premium pocket.

What Are Renton Hill Home Prices Right Now?

The honest answer is that no single published number can tell you. Redfin’s Renton Hill market data leads with a median sale price of $939,000, up 80.6 percent since the same period last year, and reports $488 per square foot, up 28.4 percent. Its trend panel, on the same page, shows $808,000 and a 7.7 percent decline.

Neither is wrong, exactly. They are drawn from slightly different slices of an almost empty data set. The window in question ended in February 2026 and contained two sales. As of this writing in August, the neighborhood’s official statistics are six months old and built on a sample you could fit in a sedan.

The closings recorded since then are more useful. Four Renton Hill homes have sold since the first week of March, from $725,000 to $1,650,000, with a median of $897,500. That is the real working range, and it sits far above the citywide median rather than below it.

So the practical answer is a band, not a figure. A modest two-bedroom on the hill has traded near $725,000, typical three-bedroom houses in the $870,000 to $925,000 range, and the largest recent sale cleared $1.65 million. Renton Hill is not an affordability story. It is the opposite.

Why the Renton Hill Home Prices Headline Contradicts Itself

Two sales. That is the entire sample, and it explains every strange thing on the page.

An 80.6 percent annual gain is not something a neighborhood does. Housing markets move in single digits. What happened is that two homes closed in this year’s window and two closed in last year’s, and the recent pair happened to be larger or better than the earlier pair. The percentage records which houses came up for sale, not what anyone’s equity did.

The same mechanism produces the contradiction. When a median is built from two data points, small differences in how a window is drawn or which property types are counted can swing the result by more than $100,000. That is how one page shows both a 80.6 percent rise and a 7.7 percent fall. Neither describes the hill.

For scale, Renton citywide recorded 221 closings in June alone. We have written about thin samples before, in our North Renton price snapshot with three sales and our Talbot Hill price snapshot with five. Renton Hill’s two-sale quarter is the thinnest we have encountered anywhere in the city, and it is the only one where the source openly disagrees with itself.

Redfin does not publish a Compete Score for Renton Hill at all, which is its own signal. The neighborhood does not generate enough transactions to support the calculation.

We say this plainly because the misreading runs both ways here. A seller who sees 80.6 percent will list into a number the market never validated. A buyer who sees the 7.7 percent decline will expect softness in a pocket where every recent sale closed well above the city median.

What Recent Closings Show About Renton Hill Home Prices

The clearest read on Renton Hill home prices comes from the sales themselves. Here are the four closings Redfin lists for the neighborhood since the start of March 2026:

• 411 Cedar Ave S, sold May 29 for $725,000. Two bedrooms, two and a half baths, 1,520 square feet, on a 5,750 square foot lot. That works out to roughly $477 per square foot.
• 808 Renton Ave S, sold May 14 for $870,000. Three bedrooms, two baths, 1,780 square feet, or about $489 per square foot.
• 420 Renton Ave S, sold March 6 for $925,000. Three bedrooms, three baths, 2,380 square feet, or about $389 per square foot.
• 1500 S 5th Pl, sold March 2 for $1,650,000. Five bedrooms, three and a half baths, 3,510 square feet, or about $470 per square foot.

What the four sales have in common

Every one is in the 98057 zip code on the hill’s core streets, and every one closed above Renton’s citywide median of $669,636. The smallest sale of the group beat the city median by roughly $55,000. The group’s median of $897,500 beats it by about 34 percent. Whatever the published percentages say, this is a consistently premium pocket.

The per-square-foot rates are unusually tight

This is where Renton Hill breaks from its neighbors. In North Renton and on Talbot Hill we found a steep inversion, where small homes carried much higher per-foot rates than large ones and a single neighborhood-wide figure overpriced anything sizeable. Renton Hill does not do that.

Three of the four closings landed between $470 and $489 per square foot, including the 1,520 square foot home and the 3,510 square foot home. The rate held nearly flat across more than twice the square footage. The single outlier is 420 Renton Ave S at about $389, the one sale meaningfully below the pack.

That consistency is genuinely useful. On this hill, unlike most of Renton, a per-square-foot approach is a defensible starting point for valuation. The reported $488 figure is one of the few published Renton Hill statistics the recent closings actually support.

How Do Renton Hill Home Prices Compare With Renton Overall?

Renton citywide posted a median of $669,636 for the three months ending June 2026, down 7.6 percent year over year, at $417 per square foot, according to Redfin’s Renton market data. The city recorded 221 sales in June, down about 15 percent from a year earlier, with homes selling in a median of 15 days and drawing about two offers each.

Set the real Renton Hill numbers beside that and the premium is unmistakable. The hill’s recent median of $897,500 runs roughly $228,000 above the city. Its $488 per square foot runs about 17 percent above the citywide $417. This is one of the few Renton neighborhoods where the per-foot rate and the sale prices both sit clearly above the city, rather than one offsetting the other.

The premium has reasons behind it. Renton Hill holds early twentieth century housing stock with architectural character that newer parts of the city cannot replicate, on elevated lots that deliver valley and territorial outlooks. Lot sizes tend to be generous by close-in standards. The hill sits immediately above downtown Renton, so the walk to the restaurants and civic core is short while the streets themselves stay residential and quiet.

Redfin scores the neighborhood 61 out of 100 for walkability, described as somewhat walkable, with a transit score of 54 rated good transit and a bike score of 30. The bike figure reflects exactly what the name suggests, since this is a hill. First Street rates the flood factor as minimal, a meaningful contrast with the low-lying grid neighborhoods near the Cedar River and the lake.

We cover the daily life side of the neighborhood in our Renton Hill neighborhood guide, and the adjacent core in our guide to downtown Renton.

How Fast Do Homes Sell on Renton Hill?

Slower than the rest of the city, and that is a feature of the market rather than a flaw in it. The reported median is 57 days on market against 15 days citywide. Even allowing for the tiny sample, the direction is consistent with what we see on the ground.

Historic homes on a hill attract a narrower buyer pool. Someone shopping for a 1920s house with original detail, on a sloped lot, above downtown, is not the same buyer comparing three similar Highlands ramblers in a weekend. There are fewer of them, they take longer to find the house, and when they find it they tend to be decisive.

The reported sale-to-list ratio of about 1.5 percent over asking supports that. Homes here are not selling at discounts. They are selling to buyers who waited for the right one and then paid slightly above the asking price for it.

The practical consequence is that a Renton Hill listing needs a longer runway than a citywide average would suggest. Two weekends without an offer means very little on this hill. In the Highlands, where volume is far higher, the same silence would be a pricing signal. You can see that contrast in our Renton Highlands price snapshot.

What Renton Hill Home Prices Mean If You Are Buying

The practical read for buyers is that Renton Hill home prices reward patience and penalize assumptions. Three things follow from the data:

• Budget from the closings, not the headline. Plan for roughly $725,000 at the entry end, $870,000 to $925,000 for a typical three-bedroom house, and past $1.5 million for a large updated home. If you arrived expecting the 7.7 percent decline, recalibrate before you start touring.
• Use the per-square-foot rate, carefully. Renton Hill is the rare Renton neighborhood where roughly $470 to $490 per foot has held across very different house sizes. It is a reasonable sanity check on an asking price here, which is not true in most of the city.
• Inspect for the age of the housing stock. These are old homes on graded lots. Foundations, retaining walls, drainage, sewer lines, wiring, and roofs all deserve real scrutiny, and hillside sites add site-specific questions that flat lots do not raise. The minimal flood rating is genuinely good news, but it says nothing about how water moves across a sloped parcel.

Inventory is the constraint that matters most. A neighborhood closing two to four homes a quarter may go weeks with nothing on the market that suits you. Be ready to move when something does list, and be willing to wait when nothing does.

What Renton Hill Home Prices Mean If You Are Selling

Sellers on this hill face a specific trap. The published 80.6 percent gain is the most flattering number attached to any Renton neighborhood right now, and it is built on two sales. Pricing to it invites a long, quiet listing and a reduction.

Price against the closings instead. Four sales since March give you a workable frame, and because the per-foot rates are so consistent here, that math actually holds up. A well-kept house in the $470 to $490 per square foot band has clear support. Anything reaching well past that needs a specific justification a buyer can see, such as a view, a lot, or a finish level that the comparables do not have.

Then plan for the timeline honestly. A 57-day median is not a warning sign on Renton Hill, it is the normal shape of selling a distinctive home to a small pool of buyers. Sellers who understand that going in tend to hold their price and get it. Sellers who expect a Highlands-paced sale start cutting in week three and leave money behind.

Presentation carries unusual weight for the same reason. Buyers drawn to a historic hillside home are buying character, so original detail that has been cared for reads as value, while deferred maintenance reads as a project with an unknown number attached. The seasonal turn matters too, and we walk through it in our Renton fall market guide.

Frequently Asked Questions About Renton Hill Home Prices

Find a Home on Renton Hill

Renton Hill home prices make sense once you stop trying to reconcile two contradictory headlines and start reading the closings. The real market is a $725,000 to $1,650,000 spread on a historic hillside above downtown, priced at a durable premium to the city, moving at a slower and more deliberate pace than the Renton average.

Useful next reads from our team: the Renton Hill neighborhood guide for streets, architecture, and daily life, the North Renton price snapshot for the neighborhood whose small-sample problem most resembles this one, and the Skyway-West Hill price snapshot for a look at the other end of the Renton price range.