On 1 September 2026, Zillow's page for 8773 W Banjo Drive in Boise carried two numbers that cannot both be doing the same job. At the top, above a 1,200-square-foot house that had closed the previous day, it said Sold — Price Unknown, and where the price per square foot goes it printed a dash. A few lines further down it said $393,700, a Zestimate, with an estimated range of $374,000 to $413,000.
Zillow knew the house had three bedrooms and two baths, sat on a 6,098-square-foot lot and was built in 2002. It knew the listing came from the Intermountain MLS under number 98988408. It knew the sale had happened, and on which day. It did not know the price, and to its credit it said so.
That is not a gap in Zillow's data. It is Idaho law working exactly as written, and almost nothing else you read about Boise home values makes sense until you know it.
Idaho is one of ten states where nobody has to tell you
There is no legal obligation in Idaho to publicly disclose what a property sold for. The Idaho Capital Sun reported in August 2021 that Idaho is one of ten states in that position, for residential and commercial property alike, and that the disclosures which do happen are, in its words, strictly voluntary or reach the assessor through the Intermountain Multiple Listing Service.
Practically, that means three things. The price is not required on the deed that gets recorded when a house changes hands, so the county recorder's file shows that a transfer occurred without saying for how much. The county assessor learns the number only if somebody chooses to hand it over. And Idaho charges no real estate transfer tax, so no branch of state government has a revenue reason to demand it.
There have been attempts to change this. A bipartisan bill in 2008, cosponsored by Sen. Shawn Keough of Sandpoint and Rep. Wendy Jaquet of Ketchum, would have mandated disclosure of sale prices on residential real estate; it passed the Idaho Senate 19 to 15 and died in the House Revenue and Taxation Committee. Ada County's chief deputy assessor told the Capital Sun in 2021 that he was unaware of any serious push since.
The Idaho Association of Realtors opposed disclosure when the Capital Sun asked in 2021, and its stated reasons are worth reading rather than paraphrasing. Its government affairs director, Max Pond, gave two: that the association "respects and values client privacy in the largest investment and purchase of their entire lives," and that in nearly all states which have enacted mandatory disclosure, a real estate transfer tax has followed. Whatever you make of that, it is the honest reason the law has not moved.
The assessor is working with less than you would guess
The consequence lands first on property tax. Idaho requires assessors to value property at market value, and market value is normally derived from what comparable homes actually sold for. In a non-disclosure state, the assessor has to reach that standard without being told the inputs.
Ada County closes the gap by asking nicely. The assessor's office sends a voluntary sales disclosure form to buyers who file for the homeowner exemption, with a section for the purchase price. Then-assessor Bob McQuade told the Capital Sun in 2021 that a little more than half of the people filling out that form include the price.
The scale of what is missing was put on the record by Brad Smith, the county's chief deputy assessor:
| Ada County, as reported in August 2021 | Properties tracked | Sales with price data | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Residential | ~160,000 | ~13,000 | ~8% |
| Commercial | ~10,000 | 150 | ~1.5% |
Eight percent is enough to do the residential job reasonably well, because Ada County has volume. One and a half percent is not, which is why Smith's argument was that non-disclosure quietly widens the gap between how commercial and residential property get assessed — and residential owners carry the difference on their tax bill.
Those figures are five years old. We have not found a more recent published count, and we are not going to invent one.
So where do the portals get their numbers?
From the MLS, and from the listing side of the transaction — which is the half of the deal that is public by design.
This is the distinction that matters and that almost nobody spells out. An asking price is published. A sale price is not. The listing agent puts the asking price in front of the world on purpose; that is what a listing is. What the buyer and seller finally agreed to is a private term of a private contract, and in Idaho it stays that way unless someone volunteers it.
So when a portal shows you a number on a sold Boise home, the first question is which of those two numbers you are looking at. On 1 September 2026 we checked three Boise homes that had closed within the previous week:
| Property | Portal | Number shown | What the underlying record says |
|---|---|---|---|
| 8773 W Banjo Dr, Boise | Zillow | Price Unknown, and a dash for $/sq ft | Sold 31 Aug 2026, source IMLS; Zestimate $393,700, range $374,000–$413,000 |
| 9922 W Aladar Ct, Boise | Redfin | SOLD ON AUG 2026 — $572,000 | Sale history: Listed 23 Jul 2026 at $572,000; Sold 31 Aug 2026 with an asterisk in the price column |
| 7061 W Gillis Dr, Boise | Redfin | $384,500 | The search card labels the figure Last list price |
Read the middle row twice, because it is the trap. Redfin's header for the Aladar Court house shows a large, confident, dollar-denominated number directly beneath the word SOLD. That number is the list price. Scroll to the sale history on the same page and the row dated 31 August 2026, the actual sale, has no price at all. The identical pattern shows up in that house's own past: listed in July 2021 at $495,000, sold in August 2021 with an asterisk.
Nobody is lying to you. Redfin labels the figure honestly if you go looking, and on the search results page it sometimes prints "Last list price" right on the card. But the visual grammar of a big number under the word SOLD says sale price to every reader who is not paying close attention, and in Idaho it usually is not one.
What that means when you are the buyer
You are being asked to make the largest offer of your life against a comparable set that is partly estimated. That is not a reason to panic, and it is not a reason to trust an automated valuation less than it deserves — a Zestimate is a real model doing real work. It is a reason to read the range instead of the headline.
For the Banjo Drive house, Zillow's own estimated range spanned $374,000 to $413,000. That is a $39,000 window, roughly ten percent of the estimate, published by the company that made the estimate. On an offer, ten percent is not a rounding error. It is the difference between a strong bid and a weak one.
The practical route to the actual number is an agent with MLS access, because sold data does flow through the Intermountain MLS to the people licensed to see it. That is a real, unglamorous part of what representation buys you in a non-disclosure state, and it is worth saying plainly rather than dressing up.
How you can actually find out what a Boise home sold for
There are three honest routes, and it is worth knowing that none of them is a website.
Ask an agent with MLS access. Sold prices do move through the Intermountain MLS, and a licensed participant can see them and advise you on them. This is the only route that reliably reaches the real number for a recent sale, and it is available to you whether or not you have signed anything.
Ask the people who were there. The buyer or the seller can tell you whatever they like about their own transaction. Non-disclosure restricts what the state requires and what may be published; it does not gag the parties.
Do not substitute the assessed value. The county's figure is a different question with a different answer: it is a mass-appraisal estimate built to set a tax base, on an annual cycle, not a prediction of what a buyer will pay next week. We have written separately about how far an assessment can sit from an asking price on a real Boise parcel — in one case in our own inventory, a factor of four. Treating the assessment as a stand-in for a sale price replaces one unknown with a number that was never trying to answer your question.
What is left is the uncomfortable but accurate summary: in Idaho, the sale price of a house is knowable, but only through people rather than records.
What that means when you are the seller
Two things, pulling in opposite directions.
Your privacy is genuinely protected. What you accept is not going to appear on a public page for your neighbours to read, and that is the Idaho Association of Realtors' first argument for keeping things as they are.
But the flip side is that your own pricing decision has to be made on data you cannot verify yourself. Every "homes in your area are selling for" figure you will be shown, whether by a portal, a lead-generation site or an agent, rests on a mixture of MLS sold data, voluntary disclosures and modelling. Ask which. An agent who can tell you where a comparable number came from is telling you something; one who just shows you the number is not.
Why we publish our own closings, and what we still will not publish
This is the reason our own numbers on this site look the way they do.
We publish all 46 of our closings from 2006 to 2026, by year and by city. We publish how long each of our seller-side listings took — every one of the 22 where we hold both the listing date and the closing date, from 14 days to 161. We publish our asking prices, because we published them at the time; a list price is ours to state.
We do not publish sale prices, and we will not. The same non-disclosure principle that keeps a stranger from looking up what you paid keeps us from putting our clients' final numbers on a web page. That is a real limit on what this site can tell you, and it is a limit we would keep even if the law changed.
What it leaves us is dates, asking prices and counts — first-hand, from our own book, checkable against the closings list. It is a narrower set of facts than a portal will show you. Every one of them is a fact we were actually present for.
What this article does not know
The Ada County figures above are from August 2021 reporting and we could not verify a more recent count. We have not confirmed who holds the assessor's office in 2026, so the quotes are attributed to the people who held those roles when they spoke.
We checked three Boise sold records on 1 September 2026. Three is an illustration, not a survey, and portals change how they display things without notice — if you check the same pages later and see something different, believe the page and not us.
We do not know why Redfin's public-record history for 9922 W Aladar Court shows a February 1990 sale at $109,985 when its 2021 and 2026 sales show no price at all. Older records sometimes carry a figure. We could not establish where that one came from, so we are leaving it as an open question rather than explaining it away.
And we have not tried to verify the exact section of Idaho Code that governs any of this. The statutory detail is a question for an Idaho real estate attorney; what is described above is how the market behaves, verified against the records themselves.