If you have spent an hour on the portals this month, you already know the surface story: Bellevue condo sales fell, prices softened, inventory climbed. It is the kind of tidy narrative that makes a buyer feel like waiting is the smart move and a seller feel like they missed the window.
The surface story is wrong. Or more precisely, it is a statistical illusion caused by one building, one calendar year, and the way large presale closings distort an annual median. Once you strip that out, the Bellevue condo market a buyer walks into in July 2026 looks materially different from the one the headlines describe. That gap between perception and mechanics is where the interesting decisions live.
The 2024 Mirage
Bellevue is a small enough condo market that a single project can move the average. In 2024, Avenue Bellevue's two towers began closing hundreds of presold luxury units, and the Mari tower delivered on top of that. Together, those buildings added more than one hundred high-priced closings inside twelve months. When 2025 arrived without a comparable delivery, the year-over-year comparison looked ugly.
Look at resale only, and the story inverts. The Downtown Bellevue Network's 2025 year-in-review found that resale condo sales volume was roughly flat, up about 1.4 percent, with median resale prices landing just above $900,000 and price-per-foot rising roughly 6.5 percent over 2024. In other words, the existing-inventory market strengthened while the aggregate number fell. Two different markets, one misleading headline.
For a buyer, that distinction is not academic. If you assume the market is soft and price your offer accordingly, you will lose the resale unit you actually want.
What the Current Numbers Say
The most recent data set worth anchoring to is the NWMLS February 2026 recap, which put King County condo inventory at 2,657 active listings, up nearly 27 percent year over year, with 4.56 months of supply. That is inside the 4-to-6 month band NWMLS treats as balanced. The countywide condo market, then, is neither hot nor collapsing. It is negotiable.
Zoom into Bellevue and the picture tightens. A Redfin snapshot pulled in early 2026 showed roughly 143 active Bellevue condos, a median list price near $599,000, about 38 days on market, and an average of two offers per home. That last figure matters. Two offers is not a bidding war, but it is not a buyer walking in alone either. It is the number that tells you leverage is available, not guaranteed.
The same February 2026 recap noted that thirty-year mortgage rates dipped below 6 percent for the first time since September 2022. Whatever your view on where rates go next, the rate move quietly pulled a segment of paused buyers back into the market during exactly the months your listing agent is telling you competition is thin.
The Supply Pipeline You Are Actually Negotiating Against
Here is where a Bellevue condo buyer's calculation gets interesting. Three projects are reshaping the downtown supply picture on a timeline that overlaps almost every purchase decision made this summer.
- Nobu Residences at Avenue Bellevue. Silverstein Properties, which took operational control of the project after its lender relationship with original developer Fortress Development ended, announced in May 2026 that both residential towers will rebrand as Nobu Residences, the brand's first residential opening in the United States. A 10,000-square-foot Nobu restaurant, the first in the Pacific Northwest, is slated to open in 2027. The rebrand is a repositioning move on 365 existing units, not new supply, but it changes the comparable set for every other luxury tower in the neighborhood.
- Park Row by Bosa. Bosa Development confirmed in late 2025 that sales for its 22-story, 143-unit tower at 201 Bellevue Way Northeast will begin in 2026. The site currently holds a strip mall that will be demolished, and the building fronts Bellevue Downtown Park with roughly 25,000 square feet of amenities. Bosa's last Bellevue project, One88, sold out in August 2021.
- Onni's 606 Bellevue superblock. The scale here is different. Three towers of roughly 600 feet, more than 1,300 apartments, hundreds of hotel rooms, about 896,000 square feet of office, two pools, a daycare, and a 15,000-square-foot public plaza on the block at 606 and 620 106th Avenue Northeast. Excavation was expected to begin in July 2026 per an Onni representative speaking at a Bellevue Downtown Association breakfast. This is rental supply rather than for-sale product, which matters for a resale buyer thinking about future exit liquidity: rental competition affects rent-comparable pricing, not resale comps directly.
Add the proposed Bevel office tower at the Washington Square superblock, with construction slated to begin in late 2026 and complete by late 2028, and the picture is a downtown that will spend the next three years under active construction. A buyer closing on a downtown condo this summer is buying into that reality. A seller closing this summer is exiting ahead of it.
Where the Leverage Actually Lives
Bellevue is not one condo market. NWMLS splits the city at Interstate 405 into map areas 520 and 530, and the two behave differently enough that citywide averages hide what a buyer needs to know.
At the attainable end, the Crossroads sub-market showed roughly 6 active condos in early 2026 at a median list of about $410,000 and 24 days on market. That is a tighter dynamic than the Bellevue-wide numbers suggest. A buyer looking under $500,000 has fewer options and less negotiating room than the "balanced market" framing implies.
Downtown and City Center move on their own logic. Transit-adjacent inventory within a ten-minute walk of an East Link station has been absorbing investor interest since the full extension opened in 2023. If you are shopping resale in Downtown Bellevue, do not expect the "condos favor buyers" headline to apply to a well-priced unit on a high floor with a view corridor. Those still trade quickly.
The pricing tiers at Avenue Bellevue itself are a useful reference for the ceiling. Publicly tracked listings have ranged from the high $700,000s for a one-bedroom in the Residences tower to more than $9 million for penthouses in the Estates. Most two-bedrooms sit between $1.3 million and $2.5 million depending on tower, floor, and view. The most expensive Bellevue condo sale of 2025 was a 3,000-square-foot residence on the 30th floor of One Lincoln Tower at $5.05 million. At the other end of the range, a studio at The Palazzo on 106th Avenue Northeast traded at $300,000.
The spread from $300,000 to $5 million inside one small downtown grid is the reason a citywide median is almost useless as a pricing input.
The Friction Nobody Prices In
Two transaction realities show up late in Bellevue condo deals and catch buyers off guard.
The first is retail activation risk in mixed-use buildings. Avenue Bellevue still had roughly 20 vacant retail spaces at the time of the Nobu announcement, about half of its 80,000 square feet of ground-floor retail. Silverstein's team stated they were close on additional tenants. For a buyer, the question is not whether the retail eventually fills. It is whether your HOA dues and your resale story assume it already has.
The second is construction adjacency. The City of Bellevue's own traffic advisories for late July 2026 include closures on Northeast 6th Street between Bellevue Way and 106th Avenue Northeast, and on 106th Avenue Northeast between Northeast 4th and Northeast 8th. That is the block Onni is preparing to excavate. If your unit's balcony faces the superblock, the next 36 months of ambient noise and access changes belong in your offer math, not in a hopeful assumption that it will not affect enjoyment or resale timing.
The buyers who do best in Bellevue right now are the ones who read the aggregate numbers, then throw them out and price the specific building, floor, and view they actually want.
A Short FAQ
Are Bellevue condo prices really falling? Aggregate 2025 numbers dropped year over year, but the decline was largely a mathematical artifact of 2024's Avenue Bellevue and Mari presale closings inflating the prior-year baseline. Resale-only pricing held steady and inched higher.
Should I wait for the Onni and Park Row supply to hit before buying? Onni's 606 project is rental, not for-sale, so it will not directly add resale comps. Park Row will add 143 for-sale units, but presale timing means those closings are years away. Waiting is a bet on rates and personal circumstances, not a bet on a supply flood.
Does the Nobu rebrand change values at Avenue Bellevue? A branded-residence repositioning typically firms up pricing power at the top of the stack more than at the entry tiers. The direct comparable set for luxury units in surrounding towers is what shifts most.
Working the Bellevue Condo Market With a Clear View
The buyers we work with at Macdonald Group tend to arrive with the headline in hand and leave with a different picture of what their money actually buys, one building and one floor at a time. If you are weighing a Bellevue condo purchase this summer, or considering a sale ahead of three years of downtown construction, we would welcome the conversation.
Get in touch.
