Cle Elum's Median Home Price Depends on Who's Counting

Open four browser tabs and search for the median home price in Cle Elum, Washington. You will collect four different numbers before you finish your coffee. One site puts it at $490,000. Zillow's value index says $597,517. Movoto's live listing feed says $1.21 million. Northwest Multiple Listing Service data puts the median at $1,480,000 to list and $975,000 to close. None of these numbers is wrong. Each one is answering a slightly different question, and the space between the smallest and the largest answer is close to a million dollars.

For anyone comparing Cle Elum against other Upper Kittitas County towns before writing an offer, that gap matters more than any single figure in it. A buyer who anchors a budget to the wrong version of "median" can walk into a showing expecting entry-level pricing and find resort-tier competition instead, or the reverse.

Same Town, Same Week, Four Very Different Numbers

The clearest way to see the problem is to line up snapshots taken close together in time.

Look closely at the last two rows. Both are pulling from the same regional MLS, in the same month, and both are describing themselves as "Cle Elum." One counted 272 listings and landed on a median list price just over $1.1 million. The other counted nearly twice as many listings, 484, and landed on a median under $600,000. More listings did not mean a higher number. It meant a wider net, one that swept in smaller, cheaper, or differently zoned properties that the narrower search excluded.

This is the first thing worth understanding before you use any published median to plan a purchase. The word "Cle Elum" is not doing the same job on every page that uses it.

The Second Gap: What Sellers Ask Versus What Buyers Actually Pay

Even within a single, consistent data source, there is a second split hiding behind the first. Northwest Multiple Listing Service data for Cle Elum, checked in late September 2026, showed 221 active listings with a median asking price of $1,480,000 on a median size of 2,664 square feet, or $556 a square foot. The same dataset's record of actual closings over the trailing six months told a different story: a median sold price of $975,000 on 2,279 square feet, or $427 a square foot.

That is not a small rounding difference. It is a $505,000 gap between what current sellers are asking and what recent buyers have actually paid, on top of the source-to-source gap above. Part of the explanation shows up in the inventory numbers themselves. That same dataset calculated 15.31 months of residential supply in Cle Elum, the kind of reading that points to a slow, oversupplied market where sellers can list confidently but buyers hold leverage on price.

Transaction volume backs this up. Closings in June 2026 totaled 19, down from 45 in June 2025, a 58 percent drop year over year. At the same time, 21 closings had occurred in the trailing 30 days as of the September check, suggesting the market is still moving, just more slowly and at prices closer to the lower, closed-sale figure than the higher, active-listing one. If you are budgeting off an asking-price median without checking what similar homes actually closed for, you are very likely budgeting high.

One Zip Code, Two Very Different Markets

The third layer is geography, and it is the one most likely to catch an out-of-area buyer off guard. The incorporated City of Cle Elum had a population of 2,157 at the 2020 census, a small walkable core with historic homes on modest in-town lots. But the Cle Elum mailing address extends far past the city limits. Suncadia, Teanaway, and Liberty properties all share the same 98922 zip code, which means the label "Cle Elum" can point to a two-bedroom bungalow near downtown or a luxury mountain home overlooking one of Suncadia’s golf courses, depending entirely on which listing you clicked.

Redfin's own city-level page makes this collision visible without meaning to. The same page that reports a $490,000 median sale price and a thin sample of three closings in a month also states, in its own summary, that popular neighborhoods within that Cle Elum search include Suncadia. In other words, the low median and the resort community are sitting on the same page, one shaped by a handful of quiet in-town resales and the other shaped by a much larger, higher-priced universe of homes that simply did not happen to close that particular month.

That thinness is the real driver of the lower numbers you will see on some sites. A median built from three sales moves wildly from month to month and says very little about the broader market it claims to represent. A median built from hundreds of active resort-area listings tells a more stable but very different story, because it is measuring a different, more expensive slice of the same zip code.

What to Ask Before You Trust Any Median

None of this means Cle Elum's pricing data is broken. It means the number by itself is not the whole answer. Before using a published median to set a budget or judge whether a listing is priced fairly, three questions do most of the work.

Is this figure built from closed sales or from active asking prices. A sold-price median tells you what buyers have actually paid recently. An asking-price median tells you what sellers currently hope to get, which in a market carrying 15 months of supply can run well above the eventual sale price.

What geography is actually included. A search labeled "Cle Elum" might mean the small incorporated city, the entire 98922 zip code, or a broader MLS area that sweeps in Suncadia, Sun Country, Lookout Mountain, and outlying acreage. Two of those searches, checked in the same week, can produce medians that differ by half a million dollars.

What is in the property mix. Land parcels, manufactured homes, and small in-town cottages pull a blended median down. Custom builds on Lookout Mountain or new construction along Suncadia's fairways pull it up. A median that blends all of these together describes an average of very different products, not a single market.

The practical fix is to skip the blended citywide number entirely and ask for a comparison built around the specific kind of property you actually want, whether that is an in-town resale, a Suncadia-area second home, or acreage further out toward Teanaway. That comparison, pulled from recent closings rather than current asking prices, is the number that should shape your offer.

Cle Elum's pricing data will keep producing headlines that seem to contradict each other, because the underlying market really does contain two or three markets wearing the same name. Understanding which one a number describes, before you build a budget or an offer around it, is the difference between a figure that helps you and one that quietly misleads you.

If you are comparing what your budget actually buys across Cle Elum, Suncadia, and the surrounding Upper Kittitas County communities, The Graham Group can pull the closed-sale comparisons for the specific property type you have in mind and walk through what the number in front of you is really measuring. Contact Us.