Seattle’s least and most expensive neighborhoods by square foot

When looking for an affordable neighborhood for buying a home, usually the first thing someone’s going to look at is listing prices. In First Hill, the median home price is about $400,000—high, but less than in many areas of the city.

But those dense homes are going to be a little smaller. Real estate research and analytics firm NeighborhoodX ranked Seattle’s neighborhoods from a different angle and found that active listings in First Hill have the fourth-highest cost per square foot out of the neighborhoods analyzed, at $607.

“Using per-square-foot prices enables readers to understand how prices change across neighborhoods more easily,” NeighborhoodX co-founder Constantine Valhouli told Curbed Seattle. “Using median selling price, numbers can be skewed by the different sizes of residences in different neighborhoods.”

They looked at 18 neighborhoods in Seattle, excluding rehabs and foreclosures, and found that price per square foot ranged from $185 to $2,408.

The most expensive is easy to guess: Downtown, with an average price per square foot of $868. Here, listings did not dip below $437 a square foot—more than the most expensive homes in Roxhill or Bitter Lake. (Those two neighborhoods had the lowest price ceiling, with no homes above $400 and change per square foot.)

The least expensive average price per square foot goes to Delridge, with an average listing price of $307 per square foot. Prices there range from $219 to $433 per square foot.

Neighborhoods that still have homes available at less than $300 per square foot include Delridge, Beacon Hill, Bitter Lake, Lake City, and, surprisingly, Ballard, Fauntleroy, and Capitol Hill.

See for yourself: We’ve embedded an interactive chart from NeighborhoodX below.

• Seattle consolidated neighborhood prices, May 2017 [NeighborhoodX]
• Seattle home prices and values [Zillow]