This summer, Redfin's neighborhood tracker showed Skyline's average home price up about 121 percent year over year. A few blocks inland, Central Anacortes was down 20 percent over the same kind of window. Old Town was down 20 percent too, in the same month, even as its own three-month median climbed 14 percent. Meanwhile the number that actually covers the whole city, Anacortes' median sale price, moved a little over 1 percent through August 2026.
Read those side by side and Anacortes looks like four different markets pulling in four different directions at once. It isn't. It's one market being measured in pieces too small to hold still.
The math behind a 121 percent headline
Anacortes as a whole sold 69 homes in May 2026, up from 61 the year before. That's enough transactions for an average to mean something close to what people assume it means: a rough sense of where typical prices sit.
Break the city into its named neighborhoods and the sample shrinks fast. Old Town closed 4 homes in June 2026, down from 6 the year before. That's the kind of volume where one home changes the whole story. Redfin's own listings from that stretch show why: one Old Town sale was a 2-bedroom, 1-bath fixer on a quarter-acre lot, sold as-is and needing extensive repairs. Another was a restored vintage home near the Guemes Channel with original box-and-beam ceilings and hardwood floors throughout. Put a handful of homes like those in the same monthly bucket and the average will bounce around based on which one happened to close, not on whether Old Town got more or less valuable.
Skyline works the same way from the other direction. Redfin's most recent snapshot lists three new-construction homes for sale in the neighborhood at a median of $743,000, a figure current as of today. Its condos have traded around $545,000. Yet resale homes in the community have historically ranged from roughly $650,000 for a smaller home up toward $1.4 million for a larger one on the water. None of those figures look anything like a 121 percent jump. What can move a thin market that hard is a single high-end custom sale. Marine Crest Place, a presale currently marketed in Skyline at roughly 4,140 square feet on a 14,000-square-foot lot with westerly views toward Burrows Island and the San Juans, is the kind of listing that could reset a neighborhood's average the month it closes, whether or not anything else in Skyline changed at all.
What eight Anacortes addresses are asking right now
A same-day snapshot of active listing medians across Anacortes' named neighborhoods, as of late September 2026, looks like this:
| Neighborhood | Median list price |
|---|---|
| Fidalgo Bay | $1,900,000 |
| Skyline | $1,995,000 |
| Rancho San Juan del Mar | $1,750,000 |
| Westside | $1,647,000 |
| Rockridge | $1,099,000 |
| Hillcrest | $994,000 |
| Village Park | $737,000 |
| Old Town | $673,500 |
Compare that table to the volatility numbers above and the disconnect is obvious. Skyline's current asking median sits near $2 million, nowhere close to either its 121 percent average or its $743,000 new-construction median. Old Town's current asking median of $673,500 sits well below the $872,000 three-month closed median from earlier in the summer. Asking prices, closed sales, and single-month averages are three different measurements of the same handful of streets, and none of them agree because the underlying sample in each neighborhood is too small to average cleanly.
The number that holds still
The one figure in this dataset that didn't lurch is the city-wide median: $736,792 through August 2026, up 1.3 percent year over year. That stability isn't a coincidence. It's the payoff of pooling enough sales that one luxury presale or one distressed fixer gets absorbed into the total instead of defining it.
Price per square foot tells a similar story about scale. Across all of Anacortes, the median sale price per square foot was $445 over the three months ending May 2026, up 6.7 percent year over year, a change modest enough to believe. Narrow the lens to Central Anacortes alone and the same metric jumped 48.2 percent over the three months ending August 2026, landing at $546 per square foot. Price per square foot is often treated as the metric immune to sample noise. In a neighborhood small enough, it isn't. The lesson isn't which metric to trust. It's that any metric gets noisier the smaller the geography you apply it to, and Anacortes' individually named neighborhoods are small enough that a single quarter can bend the number in either direction.
What the sale price doesn't count
Even a stable, trustworthy price comparison misses part of what separates these neighborhoods, because some of the real cost of living in them never shows up on a settlement statement.
Skyline is built around its marina and its Property Owners Association, which runs a clubhouse, a private beach cabana, pickleball courts, and a calendar that included a community-wide garage sale on July 10 and 11, 2026, an annual meeting on July 25, and a picnic the same day. Access to the water itself is a separate transaction from buying the house. Some Skyline listings include a deeded boat slip as part of the sale. Others don't, and a buyer who wants one has to get in line. Anacortes Marina's own site shows its 2026 waitlist open for 32, 38, and 40-foot slips, and already closed for the 44, 50, and 60-foot sizes for this season. The Port of Anacortes publishes its own estimated waitlist times for permanent moorage as of July 2026, separate from any electricity or environmental fees charged on top of the slip rate itself.
None of that changes a home's list price. It changes what the list price actually buys. A $1.995 million median in Skyline and a $1.75 million median in Rancho San Juan del Mar aren't directly comparable numbers if one includes water access and the other requires joining a waitlist that's already full for larger boats this year. A buyer comparing those two figures side by side, the way most portal searches present them, is comparing two different products that happen to share a price format.
What to actually do with these numbers
None of this means Anacortes' neighborhood data is useless. It means a single month's average, on its own, isn't a fact about the neighborhood. It's a fact about which specific homes happened to close that month.
The more reliable comparison looks at a few months at once rather than one, matches home type against home type instead of averaging across a fixer and a custom build in the same breath, and treats price per square foot as a helpful cross-check rather than a final answer, especially in a neighborhood with only a few closings a month. And for any waterfront or marina-adjacent community, the honest comparison includes asking directly whether a slip or dock is deeded to the home or dependent on a separate waitlist, since that access can matter as much as square footage in what the home is actually worth to the buyer standing in it.
A few specific questions
Why did Skyline's average price jump 121 percent when its new construction is listed near $743,000? Because an "average" in a market this size pools very different kinds of homes together. A single high-end custom sale, or a presale like the one currently marketed on Marine Crest Place, can pull the number well above what a typical resale or new-build home is actually trading for.
Is Old Town cheaper than it was last year? The answer depends on which number gets quoted. Its one-month average fell 20 percent, while its three-month median actually rose 14 percent over the same general stretch. Both numbers are accurate. Neither one describes a real 20-point swing in value. They describe which specific homes, a fixer versus a restored vintage house, happened to sell in that window.
Which number should someone actually trust when comparing Anacortes neighborhoods? The city-wide median, at $736,792 and up 1.3 percent through August 2026, is the steadiest figure available because it draws from enough sales to smooth out single-property noise. At the neighborhood level, a multi-month median and a price-per-square-foot comparison against similar homes will tell a straighter story than any single month's average.
Comparing Anacortes neighborhoods on the numbers alone will only get a buyer or seller partway there, especially when the numbers themselves shift this much from one small sample to the next. Rob Skelton walks Fidalgo Island's neighborhoods block by block and can put a specific listing, or a specific home you're preparing to sell, in the context these citywide and neighborhood figures can't provide on their own.
