Ask four different sources what a home in Tualatin costs right now and you'll get four different stories. As of December 2025, Redfin's citywide figures showed the median sale price at $599,000, up 9.1% from a year earlier. Zillow's home value index, updated through June 2026, put the typical Tualatin home at $650,706, down 3.1% over the same twelve months. Homes.com's trailing twelve months showed a median of $605,400, down 3% from the prior year. Movoto's July 2026 snapshot listed homes at a median of $633,000, down 2 to 3% year over year, with price per square foot easing 1%.
Four sources, three different directions, all describing the same 27,000-person city 12 miles south of Portland. None of them are wrong. They're measuring different things, at different moments, in a market too small for any single number to tell the whole story on its own.
A market this size can't absorb a big subdivision quietly
Tualatin sells around 15 homes a month citywide, per Redfin's December 2025 count, down from 18 in the same month a year earlier. That's a small enough sample that one subdivision closing a batch of homes in the same 30-day window can swing the median more than actual appreciation does.
Here's what that looks like inside Redfin's own neighborhood-level breakdowns. In March 2026, the East Tualatin submarket posted a median sale price of $701,000, up 10.3% year over year, on just 10 sales. In the same window, the "Midwest" Tualatin neighborhood showed a three-month median of $600,000, down 2.8% from a year earlier, even though its most recent single month showed an average price up 3.7%. Same city, same season, opposite signals depending on which streets happened to close that month.
| Source | Window | Median or typical value | Year-over-year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Redfin (citywide) | December 2025 | $599,000 | up 9.1% |
| Zillow (ZHVI) | Through June 2026 | $650,706 | down 3.1% |
| Homes.com | Trailing 12 months | $605,400 | down 3% |
| Movoto | July 2026 | $633,000 | down 2 to 3% |
This is the part a headline median can't show you: whether the homes that sold last month were representative of the neighborhood, or whether one construction project just delivered a batch of new inventory at a price point the resale market doesn't otherwise produce.
The subdivision doing the moving
That project has a name. Autumn Sunrise is a 400-lot development in Tualatin's Basalt Creek area, built by Lennar on 62 acres south of Norwood Road and east of Boones Ferry Road. The plan calls for 320 detached homes and 80 townhomes. By late 2024, 138 of those homes had already received a certificate of occupancy, with 59 more under construction, and Lennar's own sales materials describe two of the community's four home collections as sold out, with limited inventory left in the final two.
Recent listings inside Autumn Sunrise have shown five-bedroom, three-bath homes around 3,000 square feet pricing in the $830,000s to $850,000s. That's brand new construction landing well above Tualatin's citywide median from any of the four sources above. When a batch of those homes closes in the same month as a handful of older resales in a lower price band, the aggregate median moves in a direction that has nothing to do with what any individual homeowner's equity actually did.
Basalt Creek isn't finished delivering new supply, either. In June 2026, the city approved Norwood Townhomes, a 95-unit project on 9.3 acres along SW Norwood Road from developer Ken Allen of Heitman-Allen Real Estate and Construction Corp. The project is explicitly framed around Oregon's "missing middle" housing push, the 2019 state law requiring cities over 10,000 residents to allow smaller-scale housing types like townhomes and duplexes in more places. Community input pushed the developer to preserve a mature stand of evergreen trees along the Norwood Road frontage, and the plan includes open space, new sidewalks, and pedestrian connections. That's another meaningful block of inventory, at yet another price point, about to enter a market where 15 sales in a month is normal volume.
One detail worth flagging for anyone cross-shopping Basalt Creek specifically: while most of Tualatin feeds into the Tigard-Tualatin School District, the Basalt Creek planning area is zoned to Sherwood School District instead. It's a boundary quirk buyers comparing addresses a few blocks apart should confirm directly with the district rather than assume.
What the entry-level buyer is actually up against
None of this new construction is solving the problem facing a buyer with a starter budget. A recent first-time buyer analysis of the Tualatin market put the median sold price near $575,000 and found that detached single-family homes under $450,000 are rare to nonexistent in the city. At that price tier, the realistic inventory is townhomes and condos. Buyers wanting a detached home with a yard are more often landing in the $500,000 to $580,000 range, typically in older neighborhoods like Tualatin Village or near Ibach Park Estates, competing for dated ranches rather than new construction.
That's the gap that matters more than any single median: a buyer priced out of a $580,000 dated ranch in Tualatin Village isn't being offered a discount version of Autumn Sunrise. They're choosing between a smaller footprint in an existing neighborhood or waiting for whatever comes out of Basalt Creek's next phase, which so far has been pricing well above entry level.
The demand side of this equation isn't disappearing either. LAM Research, a major semiconductor employer, anchors a chunk of Tualatin's local economy, and the city has continued annexing land in Basalt Creek for future industrial and flex space, including a 54.79-acre parcel brought in during 2026 for employment use. The area's manufacturing zoning is projected to eventually support close to 1,897 jobs. New employment capacity arriving at the same time as new housing capacity is generally what keeps a market's price signals messy rather than settling into one clean trend line.
How to actually compare Tualatin to the suburb next door
If you're weighing Tualatin against another south metro suburb using a single median price pulled from a portal, you're comparing two numbers that may be measuring completely different things: one shaped by a burst of $840,000 new construction closings, the other reflecting whatever resale inventory happened to trade that month. The more useful comparison is segment by segment. What did a comparable resale home in Tualatin Village or Ibach Park Estates actually sell for in the last 60 to 90 days? What is new construction in Basalt Creek pricing at right now, and how does that compare to the finished product in a competing suburb's newest subdivision? Days on market matters here too. Redfin showed Tualatin homes selling in about 49 days as of its December 2025 data, while Movoto's July 2026 figures showed a median of 86 days, another gap likely explained by the mix of quick-selling new construction against slower-moving resale listings.
The city's own downtown revitalization work is worth tracking as well, separate from the Basalt Creek story. Metro awarded Tualatin a $740,000 grant in mid-2026 to fund the third phase of a project centered on roughly 300 acres around the Lake at the Commons, with plans for a more mixed-use downtown core and a future Riverfront Park near the Juanita Pohl Center. That's a longer horizon than most buyers are shopping on, but it's part of why comparing Tualatin's trajectory to a neighbor's requires more than one number.
A few questions worth asking before you write an offer
Is Tualatin's market up or down right now? Depends entirely on which segment you're asking about. New construction in Basalt Creek has been pricing well above the city's historical median, while much of the existing resale stock has moved sideways to slightly down over the past year, depending on the source and window measured.
Will Basalt Creek keep adding supply? Yes. Autumn Sunrise still has homes left in its final two collections as of Lennar's own marketing, and Norwood Townhomes was only approved in June 2026, meaning construction and closings are still ahead.
Does new construction in Basalt Creek attend the same schools as the rest of Tualatin? Not necessarily. The Basalt Creek planning area is zoned to Sherwood School District, while most of the rest of the city feeds into Tigard-Tualatin. Confirm boundaries directly with the district for any specific address.
A median price is a snapshot of what happened to sell, not a forecast of what your specific search will find. If you're comparing Tualatin to another suburb along the I-5 corridor and want help reading the segment that actually matches your budget, The Portera Group can walk through the current inventory by neighborhood and price band. Schedule a strategy session and we'll bring the comps that actually apply to your search, not just the headline number.
