Pull up five real estate data sites and search the same nine-tenths of a square mile of King County, and you will get five different answers to the same question. One estimator puts the typical Clyde Hill home at just under $3.9 million as of late May 2026, down more than 9 percent from a year earlier. Another, pricing off actual closed sales the same spring, reports a median of nearly $7 million in April 2026. A third counts only two houses sold in the entire month of February 2026 and calls that its market snapshot. None of these sites made an error. They are all describing the same city. The problem is the city itself.

Clyde Hill is small enough that "median price" stops behaving like a stable number and starts behaving like a coin flip. That instability is not a curiosity. It is the first thing a buyer comparing Clyde Hill to Medina, Yarrow Point, or Hunts Point needs to understand before trusting any single figure they see online, and it turns out to be connected to a second, much bigger story unfolding in Clyde Hill right now: a ballot measure that will decide whether the city can keep functioning at all.

A City Too Small for Its Own Statistics

Clyde Hill takes up just over one square mile, with about 1,100 properties collectively assessed at nearly $4.93 billion, and a 2026 population just over 3,100. It has stayed almost entirely single-family since it incorporated in 1953, the day before its neighbor Bellevue did the same. Bellevue went on to annex its way from under five square miles to more than thirty-six today. Clyde Hill made the opposite choice, and it has kept that choice for seven decades.

That smallness is exactly why the price data falls apart. In a market with dozens of closings a month, a handful of unusual sales get smoothed out. In Clyde Hill, one $17 million teardown-lot sale or one modest 1960s rambler can swing the median by hundreds of thousands of dollars, because there simply are not enough transactions to average it away. One data platform counted just two closed sales in Clyde Hill in February 2026. Another counted eighteen in April 2026, nearly double the ten it recorded the prior April. Neither count is wrong. They are measuring different months, different definitions of "sale," and a market thin enough that small differences in methodology produce large differences in headline numbers.

Here is what that actually looked like across public sources reporting on roughly the same window in 2026:

Four legitimate sources, four different pictures of the same city in the same year. If you are cross-shopping Clyde Hill against a neighborhood with real transaction volume, like Kirkland or Redmond, the median you see there is a much more trustworthy number than the median you see for Clyde Hill, simply because there is more of it to average. In Clyde Hill, the only number worth trusting is the actual closed comp on the actual parcel you are evaluating, pulled directly from the county record and a recent, specific sale, not a citywide average built from a handful of transactions.

The Same Smallness Is Now on the Ballot

The instinct that has kept Clyde Hill this small for seventy years, its own police force, its own zoning control, its own city hall, is expensive to maintain. That cost has caught up with the city's budget, and voters will decide what to do about it on November 3, 2026.

The city's own numbers tell the story. Of Clyde Hill's $6.7 million 2026 budget, $2.8 million goes to its police department and another $900,000 goes to contracted fire service from Bellevue, together more than half the city's entire annual spending. The city employs 11 full-time police and fire staff against just 3.75 in city administration, 3.25 in public works, and two in planning. City expenditures have exceeded revenue in five of the last seven years, according to reporting that reviewed Clyde Hill's finances, and a resident-led Financial Sustainability Task Force formed in December 2024 concluded the city would exhaust its reserves by 2030 without a structural fix.

On July 14, 2026, the city council passed Resolution No. 725, sending a levy lid lift to voters as Proposition 1 on the November 3 ballot. If approved, it raises the city's property tax rate from about $0.30 to $0.50 per $1,000 of assessed value starting in 2027, with 3 percent annual increases through 2036. On a home assessed at $4 million, the city's own notice puts the added cost at about $900 a year in 2027. Task force member Wayne Burns summed up the alternative bluntly at a July council meeting: without the increase, he said, "taxes go up, and police services probably go down, and local control goes down." Mayor Dean Hachamovitch, who took office after former Mayor Steve Friedman resigned, had been writing about the city's finances for years before that. "We got here by a process of denial and delay," he wrote in 2023.

Nine hundred dollars a year is not, on its own, a reason to reconsider a $4 million purchase. What matters more is what it represents. Clyde Hill's own property tax is only one piece of a total bill that also includes county, state, school, and other local levies, but it is the piece under direct local control, and it is the piece that just moved 69 percent in a single vote after sitting essentially flat for years. A structural deficit that has run since 2020 does not resolve itself with one levy lift. The 3 percent annual increases baked into Prop 1 through 2036 are the city's own acknowledgment that this is not a one-time correction.

What This Means If You're Comparing Clyde Hill to Its Neighbors

Both threads point to the same practical advice for anyone weighing Clyde Hill against another Eastside micro-city.

First, treat any citywide median price you see quoted for Clyde Hill as a rough signal, not a number to negotiate from. Ask for the specific closed comps on parcels comparable to the one you are considering, ideally within the last few months, rather than a platform-generated average built from a handful of sales.

Second, price in the tax trajectory, not just the tax rate. A buyer running carrying costs on a Clyde Hill property in 2026 should model the 2027 rate increase if Prop 1 passes, and understand that the task force's own findings point toward continued upward pressure through at least 2036, not a single adjustment and done.

Third, recognize what you are actually paying for. Clyde Hill's small size, its own police department, its resistance to commercial or multifamily zoning, is the product residents have voted repeatedly to fund, most recently in a ballot measure asking them to pay materially more for it. That is a different value proposition than a larger, more heavily annexed neighbor with broader tax base and more predictable pricing data. Neither is objectively better. They are different trades, and this fall's vote will make Clyde Hill's version of that trade more expensive than it has been in decades.

A Few Common Questions

Does the tax increase apply to every Clyde Hill property the same way? The rate change applies per $1,000 of assessed value, so the dollar impact scales with a property's assessment. The city's own estimate uses a $4 million assessed home as its example, adding roughly $900 in 2027.

Is there any exemption for older or lower-income homeowners? Washington state law, under RCW 84.36.381, allows a property tax exemption for qualifying homeowners age 61 or older, or those who are disabled and meet income requirements. Buyers should confirm current eligibility directly with King County Assessor resources.

Could the ballot measure fail? It is a voter-approved measure, and Clyde Hill's own task force has said that without some structural fix, the city risks exhausting its financial reserves by 2030, with a forced merger into a neighboring city cited as one possible outcome. The outcome will not be known until after the November 3, 2026 election.

If you are trying to make sense of what a specific Clyde Hill property is actually worth, or how a tax vote three months out should factor into your offer, that is exactly the kind of question that does not have a citywide answer. The Gray Team works these micro-markets parcel by parcel, with the comps and the context that a platform average cannot give you. Reach out for a confidential valuation and private consultation before you rely on a number you found online.