If you have been watching Kirkland from a distance this year, you have probably absorbed two facts that seem to point in opposite directions. Google is moving ahead with plans for a third campus in the city, a project big enough to eventually house 7,000 workers. And Kirkland home prices, by several measures, are cooling. Inventory is up. Homes are sitting longer. Price per square foot has dropped.
Most people assume those two things cannot both be true at once. A major employer expands, and home prices around it are supposed to follow. That is the story everyone brings into a Kirkland search. It is also, right now, not quite what the data shows. Understanding why requires separating two timelines that happen to be running through the same city at the same moment: a decade-long infrastructure story that just hit a milestone, and a shorter, more ordinary supply-and-rate story that is playing out in this quarter's closings.
The Headline Versus the Closing Table
| What the Google news implies | What Kirkland's closing data shows right now |
|---|---|
| A major employer is scaling up, so competition for homes should be intensifying | Active inventory is running well above a year ago, and Kirkland now sits at roughly 4.2 to nearly 5 months of supply, territory that favors buyers |
| Prices should be climbing to meet new demand | Price per square foot is down in the mid to high single digits year over year across multiple measures |
| Buyers should expect bidding wars | Homes are taking meaningfully longer to sell than they did a year ago, and sellers are conceding a bit on price |
The headline and the closing table are describing two different clocks. One of them has not started yet.
The Site Google Walked Away From, and Why It Is Back
The third campus Google is now advancing sits on roughly nine and a half acres near NE 85th Street and I-405, land that until recently held the Lee Johnson Auto dealerships in Kirkland's Rose Hill area. This is not Google's existing Kirkland Urban campus downtown. It is a separate, much larger project the company first proposed years ago, then shelved, then revived.
In January 2023, Google and the Lee Johnson family told the city they would not move forward with the purchase and redevelopment of the site. The announcement landed the same day Google disclosed a round of layoffs affecting roughly 12,000 employees globally, about 6% of its workforce at the time. For a while, the project looked dead.
It came back. A pre-submittal application filed with the city and reporting from The Urbanist describe a current plan for four office towers totaling approximately 1.25 million square feet, supporting around 7,000 employees, about 6,000 of them Google's own. A public hearing on the development agreement between the city and Google has already taken place, and the earliest phases are not projected to open until 2027, with the full build-out stretching to 2032.
That gap matters more than almost anything else in this story. The jobs Google is planning are years away. The housing market reacting to them today would be reacting to something that has not happened yet.
What Actually Changed Was the Interchange, Not the Demand
If demand for Kirkland office space did not suddenly spike in 2025, what did change between Google's exit and its return? The most plausible answer sitting in the public record is not a market signal at all. It is a construction schedule.
Sound Transit and WSDOT broke ground on a rebuilt NE 85th Street interchange in September 2023, a project that replaces an old cloverleaf ramp system with a three-level interchange carrying a dedicated Stride bus rapid transit station, part of the regional I-405 BRT line connecting Bellevue, Lynnwood, and points beyond. The old overpass came down in May 2025, and the first phase of the rebuilt interchange opened in May 2026, ahead of full Stride service. Sound Transit has described the project as one of its more expensive BRT investments, with early cost estimates running toward a third of a billion dollars.
Google's site sits within walking distance of that station. A pre-submittal filing this specific, timed this closely to an interchange opening, is not a coincidence worth ignoring. What likely changed for Google was not how many workers wanted to be in Kirkland. It was how much certainty the company had about the road, the transit access, and the years of construction disruption around its own front door. Infrastructure de-risked the decision. Demand was never really the variable.
What the Current Numbers Actually Say
Set the campus story aside for a moment and look only at what has closed. As of July 2026 reporting, with some figures drawn from the three months ending in May 2026:
- Kirkland's active residential inventory has climbed to somewhere between 4.2 and nearly 5 months of supply, a level real estate data providers generally treat as buyer-favorable, a sharp shift from the sub-half-month supply the city ran during the tightest pandemic years.
- Homes that sold in Kirkland over the three months ending in May 2026 took roughly 13 days to go under contract, more than double the 6 days typical a year earlier.
- Price per square foot for Kirkland homes has fallen by figures ranging from roughly 6% to nearly 10% year over year depending on the measure, even as blended median sale prices look closer to flat.
- Sellers are conceding modestly on price, with closings as of June 2026 landing around 2% under original list, a change from the waived-contingency conditions of recent years.
That last point about price per square foot versus the median is worth sitting with, because it is where a lot of casual market reading goes wrong.
Why the Median Is Lying to You Right Now
A blended citywide median mixes every closed sale together, from a condo in Totem Lake to a waterfront estate in West of Market. When more large single-family homes close relative to smaller or mid-tier properties, the median can hold steady or even tick up while the actual value of a given square foot of Kirkland real estate is falling. That appears to be exactly what is happening. Single-family closings over the first half of 2026 carried a median price near $1.6 million on roughly 2,400 square feet, a healthy number on its face, while price per square foot on those same closings and on the broader condo market has been sliding.
The softening is not confined to single-family homes either. Kirkland and Bridle Trails condos, one of the priciest condo submarkets on the Eastside, saw their median sale price move down in the low single digits year over year in first-quarter 2026 reporting, and King County condos overall dropped by double digits over that same period. When softening shows up across both property types at once, it points to a broad supply and rate story rather than anything specific to one segment of buyers.
The Irony of Where the Softening Is Concentrated
Here is the detail that ties the two halves of this story together. Google's future campus sits in Rose Hill, near the NE 85th interchange, in the same general corridor as Totem Lake's ongoing new-construction growth. These are precisely the areas where added inventory and longer days on market are showing up most. The neighborhood absorbing years of construction disruption from both the interchange and, eventually, the campus itself is also the neighborhood currently carrying more of Kirkland's supply increase.
Waterfront and walkable core neighborhoods, the West of Market and Houghton corridor closest to Marina Park and downtown, have historically traded on a different rhythm, with buyers who are less rate-sensitive and inventory that turns over more rarely. If you are comparing pockets of Kirkland rather than treating the city as one number, that distinction is worth more than any citywide statistic. We have written before about how much Kirkland's neighborhoods differ from one another for exactly this reason.
What This Means If You Are Timing a Move to Kirkland
King County's median sale price came in at $879,500 in July 2026, the second highest of any county in the Northwest MLS service area behind only San Juan County, a reminder that even a softening Kirkland is not a discount market in any absolute sense. But relative to itself, and relative to a tighter-supply neighbor like Bellevue, which has spent much of this summer closer to two and a half months of inventory, Kirkland is currently offering more room to negotiate than it has in years.
The Google story has not gone away. It has simply not arrived yet. Buyers who wait for visible proof of 7,000 new employees before acting are, by definition, waiting for a window to close. Buyers who understand the actual timeline, the interchange that already opened, the campus phases that run into 2032, the years of construction still ahead, get to make a decision with the mechanism explained rather than guessed at.
If you're comparing Kirkland to Bellevue, Redmond, or another Eastside city right now and want someone who can walk through what these numbers actually mean for a specific property or neighborhood, that is exactly the kind of conversation The Sessoms Group has with relocating buyers and move-up families every week. You can also browse current Kirkland listings and neighborhood detail to see how these dynamics show up house by house.
Schedule your concierge consultation here and we will walk through what today's Kirkland numbers mean for your specific timeline.
