Citywide, the typical Hillsboro home sold after about 26 days on the market and drew roughly two offers, according to Redfin data for the three months ending June 2026. That's the number that shows up whenever someone searches home prices here, and on its own it reads like a market in gentle, even balance.
It isn't one. An appraisal analysis of original RMLS closed-sales data, published in January 2026, found that once new-construction sales are pulled out of the citywide figures, existing condominiums and attached homes have been sitting for meaningfully longer stretches and closing at consistently lower prices. Two homes in Hillsboro right now can be having completely different years, and the median sale price of $525,000 for that same three-month window, down about 1.5 percent year over year, blends both of them into one number.
One city, two very different markets
Zillow's numbers tell a similar surface story. The average Hillsboro home value stood at $520,244 as of late June 2026, down 2.9 percent over the prior year, with homes typically going pending in about 37 days. Read on its own, that looks like a city easing gently, the kind of soft landing you'd expect after a few years of rapid appreciation.
A single citywide median works like a photograph taken from too far away. It blends a neighborhood where offers are still competitive with one where sellers are cutting price twice before closing, and it hands you one blurred number for both. If you're comparing streets in Hillsboro rather than just checking a headline stat, that blur is the first thing worth pulling apart.
Why the split isn't about the age of the paint
The easy assumption is that new construction is simply outperforming older homes. There's some truth in that. New construction made up 27.8 percent of all Hillsboro closed sales between 2023 and 2025, according to the same appraisal analysis, a high enough share that it can mask softening in the rest of the market just by volume alone.
But the appraisal blog's own read on the data points somewhere more specific than "new versus old." It noted that proximity to Hillsboro's semiconductor corridor no longer commands the location premium it once did, at least in denser, higher-priced segments like condos and townhomes. That's a different story than simple age. It's a story about which paycheck a neighborhood's buyers were counting on when they bought.
The homes losing the most ground aren't simply the oldest ones. They're the ones whose buyer pool was built around one paycheck.
Where the shock landed, and where it didn't
- Ronler Acres, Jones Farm, and Hawthorn Farm, the Intel campuses that anchor Hillsboro's semiconductor corridor, sit closest to older, denser neighborhoods like Orenco Station and AmberGlen, exactly the kind of segment the appraisal analysis flagged as losing its location premium.
- Neighborhoods with a more diversified commuter base, not concentrated around one employer's payroll, have generally had an easier time holding their footing through the same stretch.
- South Hillsboro, built around the Reed's Crossing master-planned community, has kept selling briskly. A December 2025 announcement from Reed's Crossing's homebuilders reported more than 1,470 homes sold to date, with 177 additional sales projected for 2026.
The mechanism behind that first bullet point is specific and dated. Between late 2024 and the end of 2025, Intel eliminated more than 4,400 Oregon positions, roughly a 20 percent cut from peak local headcount, concentrated in Hillsboro facilities. The cuts came in three identifiable waves: about 1,300 positions in October 2024, another roughly 2,400 in July 2025 spread across Ronler Acres, Jones Farm, Hawthorn Farm, and the Aloha site, and a further 669 in November 2025. Every one of those job losses touched a household that had, at some point, sized a mortgage or a lease around a Hillsboro paycheck.
The part most market updates leave out
Here's the detail that changes how you should read Hillsboro's numbers this month. The employer at the center of that slowdown isn't still shrinking.
Oregonian technology reporter Mike Rogoway, interviewed on KLCC's "Oregon on the Record" podcast in June 2026, described Intel's Oregon headcount bottoming out near 16,000, down from around 22,000 at its peak, but treated that as a stabilization point rather than a continued slide. Intel's Hillsboro campus is one of only three sites in the world where the company develops its most advanced chip manufacturing process, known as 18A, work that underpins the turnaround story Rogoway was describing. In August 2025, the U.S. government converted unpaid CHIPS Act grant funding into a nearly 10 percent equity stake in Intel, a move announced in the same reporting that covered the Washington County layoffs already rattling Hillsboro's resale market. A government taking an equity position is a bet that a company's operations keep running, not a signal that they're winding down.
Put those two facts next to each other and the picture shifts. A home in an Intel-adjacent neighborhood that's been sitting for two months isn't necessarily reacting to fresh bad news. It may be catching up to a shock that started in late 2024, in an area whose main employer has, by most accounts through mid-2026, already stopped cutting.
What this means if you're comparing Hillsboro neighborhoods
If you're weighing an established neighborhood near Orenco Station against a newer street in Reed's Crossing, the honest comparison isn't old versus new. It's how many paychecks stand behind the buyers competing for each type of home.
- Ask how concentrated a neighborhood's original buyer pool was around one employer, not just how old the house is.
- Treat "days on market" as a lagging figure in Intel-adjacent pockets. A long listing there may reflect 2024 or 2025 conditions still working through the system rather than this month's actual demand.
- In new-construction communities, look at what's actually driving buyers, not just the fact that the homes are new. At Reed's Crossing, builders have reported rising interest in homes with accessory dwelling units and main-level bedrooms suited to multigenerational living, which points to buyers solving for flexibility rather than chasing new construction for its own sake.
- Don't assume new automatically means insulated. Reed's Crossing's own developer has said engineers and other tech professionals remain among its most common buyers. The community isn't immune to the tech sector, it's just spread across more of it.
A short FAQ for anyone weighing both sides
Does Intel's stabilization mean Intel-adjacent Hillsboro homes will bounce back soon? There's no reliable timeline for that. Housing data tends to lag employment data, sometimes by well over a year, especially for condos and attached homes. The stabilization reporting is recent, dated to spring and summer 2026, while the resale slowdown reflects layoffs that ran through late 2025. Anyone buying or selling in that pocket should look at recent closed comps on their specific street rather than lean on the citywide trend.
Is South Hillsboro overpriced just because the homes are new? Not automatically. The strength there reflects a buyer base spread across multiple employers and a Reed's Crossing Town Center that's steadily filled in with names like Market of Choice, Handel's Ice Cream, and Qdoba. Pricing still needs to be checked against actual recent closings in that plat, the same as anywhere else.
How do I find out which side of the split my target street is on? City-wide figures won't answer that question. It takes a block-level look at recent closed sales, not a portal average, to know whether a specific street behaves more like Orenco Station or more like Reed's Crossing right now.
If you're trying to figure out which side of Hillsboro's split your target street falls on, Victoria Marchese can walk the recent closed sales with you before you write an offer or list a home. Schedule a free consultation to talk through the specific pocket of Hillsboro you're considering.
