Pull up two different real estate sites and search the same town, and you can walk away with two different markets. In Kingston this year, that isn't a glitch. Earlier in 2026, tracking showed the town's median sale price climbing 47.7% year over year to $783,000, while in the same stretch the median price per square foot fell 23.5% to $287. Both numbers came from the same dataset, covering the same houses, in the same town.
A house cannot get more expensive and cheaper at the same time. A market can, and Kingston's small size is exactly why.
The Two Numbers That Can't Both Be True
Total price and price per square foot usually move together. When they split apart this hard, the cause is rarely a shift in what buyers are willing to pay for a given amount of space. It's almost always a shift in what kind of house happened to sell.
If a run of larger homes closes in one window, the median total price rises because bigger houses cost more in absolute terms. But larger homes also tend to carry a lower cost per square foot than smaller ones, because a portion of what you pay for any house (permitting, foundation, kitchen, bathrooms) doesn't scale up proportionally with size. Add 1,500 square feet to a home and you rarely add 1,500 square feet of cost. The result is a market where the median price and the median price per square foot can point in opposite directions without either number lying.
Kingston is a small enough market for this to matter more than it would in a larger city. That's the part worth understanding before you read the next headline about home values here.
What Actually Moved
Look at three homes that were active on the Kingston market this summer, and the pattern shows up cleanly.
| Listing area | Price | Size | Price per sqft |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jefferson Beach (new construction) | $485,000 | 1,600 sqft | $303 |
| Eglon (wooded acreage, built 1997) | $1,200,000 | 2,735 sqft | $439 |
| Kingston (built 2023) | $1,439,000 | 5,211 sqft | $276 |
The most expensive home on this list, a 5,211-square-foot property, actually carries the lowest cost per square foot. The smallest and cheapest home, a new-construction cottage in Jefferson Beach, costs more per square foot than either of the larger properties. Size and per-square-foot cost run backward from what most buyers expect.
Now scale that pattern up to a whole month of closings. Kingston sees roughly a dozen home sales close each month. Multiple listing service records show 77 single-family closings across the trailing six months ending in late July 2026, an average of about 13 a month, with only 11 closings recorded in the most recent 30 days. When a market moves that few homes, one month heavy on Jefferson Beach-style starter homes and the next heavy on Eglon acreage or a four-bedroom newer build is enough to send the median price and the median price per square foot swinging in different directions, even if not a single seller changed their asking strategy.
Waterfront adds another layer. Kingston's Puget Sound and Appletree Cove shoreline covers everything from a low-bank Gamble Bay cottage to a Miller Bay estate with a private deep-water dock built to hold a 90-foot yacht. A handful of those larger estates closing in the same window can pull a median in a direction that has nothing to do with how the town's typical home is performing.
What the Current Numbers Actually Say
Set the earlier contradiction aside and look at where things stood as of July 2026. Listed homes carried a median asking price of $692,000, down 2% from July 2025, at a median of $311 per square foot, with homes spending a median of 84 days on market, unchanged from the year before. Active inventory skewed noticeably higher: 44 single-family houses were on the market with a median asking price of $1,090,000 and a median size of 2,758 square feet, working out to roughly $395 per square foot for what's currently listed versus what's actually closing.
That gap between what's listed and what's closing (a roughly $290,000 spread between the median active asking price and the trailing six-month closed median of $799,990) tells you something the single median never could: Kingston's active inventory this summer is skewed toward larger, pricier homes than what buyers are actually completing purchases on.
Inventory levels add a second layer of contradiction. Kingston's own supply ran close to 4.17 months in late July, the kind of number that typically signals a buyer's market. Kitsap County as a whole told a different story. Northwest Multiple Listing Service data for July 2026 put Kitsap at just 2.28 months of inventory, the tightest of any county in the entire NWMLS service area, ahead of Snohomish, Pierce, Thurston, and Clallam. A town can sit inside a county behaving like a seller's market while the town itself behaves like a buyer's market, purely because its own transaction count is too thin to smooth out.
Reading Past the Headline
None of this means Kingston's numbers are unreliable. It means a single month's headline isn't built to carry the weight buyers and sellers put on it. A few habits make the difference between reading a headline and reading a market.
- Ask which window the number covers. A single month of Kingston closings can run anywhere from 11 to 15 transactions. A trailing six-month median smooths out the lumpiness that a monthly figure can't.
- Ask what sold, not just what it sold for. A median built from a run of in-town starter homes tells a different story than one built from waterfront estates, even at an identical dollar figure.
- Read total price and price per square foot together. When they diverge sharply, the divergence is usually about which homes transacted, not about a real shift in what land and construction are worth.
- Treat county-level labels as a starting point, not a verdict for your specific town. Kitsap running tight in July 2026 doesn't mean every town inside it is competing the same way.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Kingston a buyer's market or a seller's market right now? It depends on which layer you're reading. Kitsap County posted 2.28 months of inventory in July 2026, among the tightest readings in the region and consistent with a seller's market. Kingston's own supply ran closer to 4.17 months in the same window, a level more typical of a buyer's market. Both are accurate. They're measuring different scales.
Why do different sites show different prices for the same town? Portals calculate from different reference points: some track active listing prices, others track closed sale prices, and the time window (a single month versus a trailing average) changes the outcome substantially in a market as thin as Kingston's. None of them are wrong. They're answering slightly different questions.
What's the most reliable way to know what a Kingston home is actually worth today? Trailing sold data for comparable homes in the same submarket, not a town-wide median. A Jefferson Beach cottage, an Eglon acreage property, and a Miller Bay waterfront estate belong to three different pricing conversations even when they share a zip code.
If you're trying to price a Kingston home to sell, or trying to figure out what a listing price actually says about a property's value, a town-wide number isn't going to get you there. Mark Middleton Real Estate works Kingston and the surrounding Kitsap Peninsula submarket by submarket, using closed comparables and current inventory data rather than a single median. Request a private consultation to talk through what your specific corner of Kingston is actually doing right now.
