A median is usually an abstraction. This one is not. Across the 22 homes we have listed where we hold both an asking price and a square footage, the median asking price is $385,000 and the median home is three bedrooms, two bathrooms, about 1,325 square feet.
That is not a market statistic. It is a description of an actual kind of house, and if you are shopping in the Treasure Valley at around this number, it is roughly what you are shopping for.
The whole range
| Asking price | Homes |
|---|---|
| Under $200,000 | 2 |
| $200,000 – $300,000 | 2 |
| $300,000 – $400,000 | 11 |
| $400,000 – $600,000 | 3 |
| Over $600,000 | 4 |
Low $43,500, median $385,000, high $749,500.
Half of our listings sit in a single $100,000 band. That is the most honest thing this table says, and it says it about us rather than about Boise: this is a practice that works mostly in the middle of the valley's market, with a handful of properties at each extreme.
Square footage runs from 728 to 2,332, median 1,325. Bathrooms cluster even harder than bedrooms — fourteen of the 22 have exactly two.
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bedrooms | 1 | 4 | 12 | 4 | 1 |
| Bathrooms | 3 | 14 | 5 | — | — |
Twelve of 22 are three-bedroom homes. Lot sizes run from 0.05 acres to 1.9.
What $385,000 looks like in practice
Around the median you are looking at a house of roughly 1,200 to 1,500 square feet, three bedrooms, two bathrooms, on a lot measured in tenths of an acre rather than in acres. In our book that describes homes in Boise proper and in Nampa about equally.
Below about $300,000 the picture changes shape rather than just shrinking. Our two lowest are not smaller versions of the median house; they are properties well outside the valley's core at price points that behave nothing like a Boise home. Treat anything under $200,000 in this valley as a different kind of purchase requiring different questions, not as a bargain version of the same one.
Above about $600,000 the four at the top are where square footage, lot and location start moving independently of each other, which is the point at which comparing homes by price per square foot stops working entirely.
About price per square foot
Across these 22, price per square foot runs from $45 to $484. The median is $316.
Strip out the two properties outside the valley and it still runs from $162 to $484 — a three-fold spread among homes sold in the same region by the same two agents. So the number is close to useless as a way of judging whether a specific house is fairly priced, which is a case we have already made in detail in what a listing price actually tells you. We are repeating the figure here only so you can see it holds on the sold side too, not just on live listings.
The limits of this page
These are asking prices, not sale prices. We hold our own listing figures, and we do not publish what any home finally closed at. Read every number above as what was asked, not as what was paid — and note that in a slower market those two numbers separate more than they did in 2021.
Twenty-two homes is a small sample and it is our sample. The Treasure Valley trades thousands of homes a year. If you want a market-wide median for Boise, Ada County or the metro, Zillow and Redfin publish one and theirs is the right number for that question.
The distribution is also not evenly spread across the valley. Of these 22, twelve are in Boise, four in Nampa, two in Caldwell, and one each in Meridian, Garden City, Gardena and Fruitland. That is enough to describe our own book and not enough to describe any one of those cities.
And these are the homes we listed, which is a filtered set by definition. Sellers who chose to work with us are not a random sample of sellers.
What to do with it
Use it as a reality check on the shape of a price band rather than as a valuation. If you are told a 1,300 square foot three-bedroom in this valley should be $520,000, this table is a reasonable prompt to ask what specifically justifies the gap. It will sometimes be a very good answer — a lot, a location, a renovation that genuinely changes the house. It will sometimes not be.
Our neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood price picture, built from Zillow and Redfin market data rather than from our own listings, is in what Boise neighborhoods cost. The record these 22 come from is in twenty years of Boise closings.
If you want to know what your number actually buys on the streets you are looking at, ask us.