Pull up three different real estate sites this week and search Madison Park, and you'll get three different answers to what feels like it should be a simple question. One site puts the median asking price at $969,000. Another shows a median sale price of $1.28 million for the same ZIP code. A third's home-value index averages out at $1.81 million. A fourth, looking at the trailing twelve months of closed sales, lands somewhere between $2 million and $2.5 million.
None of these sites made an error. They're all measuring something real. The problem is that "median home price in Madison Park" isn't one number waiting to be found. It's a moving target that depends on which handful of houses happened to close, which boundary line the site drew around the neighborhood, and whether they're counting what sellers asked or what buyers actually paid. If you're comparing Madison Park to another neighborhood using a single headline figure, you're comparing noise to noise.
Four numbers, one neighborhood, same summer
Here's what that looks like laid out side by side:
| Metric | Figure | Time window |
|---|---|---|
| Median asking price, active listings | $969,000 | August 2026 |
| Median sale price, ZIP 98112 | $1.28 million | through July 2026 |
| Home-value index average (all homes, not just recent sales) | $1.81 million | as of June 30, 2026 |
| Median closed sale price, trailing 12 months | roughly $2.0 to $2.5 million | through May 2026 |
That's a spread of well over a million dollars, all describing the same small lakefront neighborhood in the same general stretch of 2026. If you were budgeting off the first number and someone told you the fourth, you'd think you were priced out entirely. You wouldn't be. You'd just be looking at two different questions dressed up as the same statistic.
Why five sales can swing a whole neighborhood's number
Madison Park doesn't sell many homes in a given month. Realistic estimates put the core neighborhood at around five home and condo closings monthly. Widen the boundary to what agents sometimes call Greater Madison Park, folding in Broadmoor and Washington Park, and that climbs to roughly nine.
Five or nine sales is not a sample size that produces a stable median. It's a sample size where one unusual closing bends the whole curve. And Madison Park's housing stock is built to produce unusual closings, because it isn't one type of home. It's a condo corridor sitting right up against a row of waterfront estates, with very little in between to smooth out the transition.
On the condo side, buildings like Canterbury Shores, Lakeshore West, and Lakeview Lanai anchor the lower and middle bands. As of May 2026, active condo listings in the neighborhood ranged from $354,000 to $1.65 million, depending on floor, view, and whether the unit sits directly on the lake. On the single-family side, listings this year have typically run from roughly $1.5 million for an interior lot up toward $5 million or more for anything with real lake frontage.
Now imagine August's closings happen to include three condos and one modest interior house. The median drops. Imagine September's closings include one lakefront estate. The median jumps by hundreds of thousands of dollars, and nothing about the underlying neighborhood changed. You just got unlucky, or lucky, with timing.
Where the boundary makes it worse
The sample-size problem would be enough on its own, but Madison Park has a second layer of confusion: nobody agrees on where it ends.
Some sites draw a tight circle around the village core and its immediate lakefront blocks. Others draw "Greater Madison Park" to include Broadmoor, the gated, golf-course community established in 1927 that borders the neighborhood, along with neighboring Washington Park. That single decision moves the ceiling dramatically. In July 2026, active listings within the narrower Madison Park boundary topped out around $4.5 million. Widen the boundary to include Broadmoor and Washington Park, and that same summer's ceiling reached $15.95 million.
The effect shows up in the sold data too. In the six months ending mid-2026, the median sale price for single-family homes across Greater Madison Park sat at $3,227,500, working out to roughly $918 per square foot. Compare that to the narrower neighborhood's headline sale figures from earlier in this piece, sitting closer to $1.3 million to $2.5 million, and you can see how much of the gap is simply about which houses got invited into the calculation.
None of this means one number is right and the others are wrong. It means every median has an invisible footnote explaining exactly which properties it counted and when, and almost no site shows you that footnote.
A median price is a snapshot of whoever happened to close that month, drawn inside whatever boundary the site chose to use. It's not a verdict on what the neighborhood is worth. It's a coin flip dressed up in decimal points.
What this actually means if you're pricing a purchase or a listing
The same pattern shows up in a metric buyers often trust even more than price: days on market. One measurement, tracking closed sales in August 2026, put the median at 38 days, down from the year before. A separate tool, averaging every home currently sitting active on the market including ones that haven't sold yet, showed a running average closer to 62 days. Both are describing real activity. They're just answering different questions: how fast did homes that already sold actually move, versus how long have today's listings been waiting.
If you're comparing Madison Park to a neighborhood like Madrona or Leschi, or trying to figure out whether now is a reasonable time to make a move, the fix isn't to find the one "correct" median. It's to stop asking the question at the neighborhood level entirely. Ask it at the property-type level instead.
A buyer looking at a one-bedroom condo near the village should be comparing recent condo closings in buildings similar to the one they're considering, not the neighborhood's blended median. A buyer looking at an interior single-family home three blocks off the lake should be pulling comps from other interior single-family homes, not letting a $6 million waterfront closing three doors down skew their sense of a fair offer. A seller preparing to list should ask their agent for closed sales in their specific price band and property type over the last 60 to 90 days, not a year-old average that includes homes nothing like theirs.
That's the actual value a local agent adds in a market this small. Not access to a better number, because a better single number doesn't exist here. The value is knowing which of the four contradictory numbers actually applies to the specific house you're buying or selling, and being able to explain why.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Broadmoor part of Madison Park? It borders Madison Park and is sometimes grouped with it under "Greater Madison Park" on real estate sites, but Broadmoor is its own gated, golf-course community, established in 1927, with its own entry and price tier. Whether a given statistic includes Broadmoor or not can meaningfully change the number you're looking at.
How many homes actually sell in Madison Park in a typical month? Roughly five, counting both houses and condos, within the core neighborhood boundary. That climbs to around nine a month if you include the broader area covering Broadmoor and Washington Park. Either way, it's a small enough number that one unusual sale can move the median noticeably.
If there are more condos for sale than houses, why doesn't the median stay low? Because condos and houses occupy very different price tiers, not overlapping ones. A month with several condo closings pulls a blended median down. A month with even one lakefront estate closing pulls it back up sharply. With so few total sales, there's rarely enough volume in between to smooth that out.
Should I trust the price I see on a listing site when I'm budgeting for Madison Park? Treat it as a rough starting point, not a target. The more useful exercise is asking for closed sales in your specific property type and price band from the last two to three months, which will tell you far more about what you'll actually pay than any neighborhood-wide median.
If you're trying to figure out what your budget actually buys in Madison Park, or what a specific home is really worth against the right set of comparables, that's the kind of digging Exact Home Team does before we ever talk price with a client. Let's Get Started.
