North Hills Doesn't Have One Housing Market. It Has Four Of Them.

Search for the median home price in North Hills this year and you will get answers that don't agree with each other. One source puts it at $575,000 for the first quarter of 2026. Another reports $835,000 for the three months ending in May. A third lists $919,000 as of February. A fourth cites $924,656 for April. All four are describing the same stretch of Midtown Raleigh, in the same calendar year.

None of these numbers is wrong. That's the part that trips people up. When a buyer or seller in North Hills asks "what's the market doing," they're really asking a question that assumes one market exists. It doesn't. North Hills is landlocked, fully built out, and stitched together from housing stock that ranges from 1950s brick ranches to towers still under construction. A single median blending all of that together tells you almost nothing about what a specific home is worth.

The Same Three Streets, Four Different Prices

Walk from St. Albans, with its tree-lined blocks of 1950s and 60s brick ranches and its long-running Fourth of July parade, over toward Anderson Heights and its mix of renovated mid-century homes and townhomes reachable by the pedestrian paths off Glenwood Avenue, and you've crossed through two different pricing realities without leaving the neighborhood. Push further toward Bedford at North Hills, where custom infill has replaced older lots one at a time, and the numbers shift again.

Here's roughly what each product type is actually trading for in 2026, based on the range reported across current listings and closed sales:

Recent closed sales in North Hills have ranged from the mid-$600,000s to more than $7 million within this same footprint. That spread is the real story. A "median" calculated across all of it moves for reasons that have nothing to do with whether the neighborhood is appreciating or cooling. It moves because of which type of home happened to close that month.

The Number That Should Worry You More Than The Median

Here's where it gets genuinely counterintuitive. In one recent snapshot, North Hills' median sale price rose 10.4 percent year over year. In the same window, the median price per square foot in North Hills fell 5.5 percent.

Read that again. The price went up. The price per square foot went down. Both statements are true, for the same neighborhood, in the same period.

The explanation isn't a contradiction, it's a composition shift. If more of the closings in that window happened to be larger custom homes or bigger lots, and fewer were smaller condos or townhomes, the median sale price climbs even as the underlying value per square foot softens. Raleigh overall saw its price per square foot fall roughly 3.4 percent over a comparable stretch, which puts the North Hills decline in a different light: it's not that this submarket is losing ground faster than the rest of the city, it's that the mix of what sold shifted more dramatically here than it did citywide.

This is exactly why a single headline figure is close to useless for anyone actually pricing a specific home. If you're selling a 1,400 square foot townhome, a median built from teardown-to-custom sales tells you nothing about your comp set. If you're buying a condo, the same median is actively misleading. The number you want isn't the neighborhood median. It's the median for your specific product type, on your specific side of the neighborhood, closed in the last 90 days.

Towers Are Coming, And They Will Keep Changing What "Comparable" Means

The comp problem is about to get more complicated, not less. In January 2026, the Raleigh City Council voted 6-2 to approve a rezoning that touches more than 11 acres across nine properties near Six Forks Road, Lassiter Mill Road, Rowan Street, and The Circle at North Hills, allowing buildings as tall as 37 stories in districts that had previously been capped at 5, 12, or 20 stories depending on the parcel. For reference, the tallest residential building currently standing in North Hills is Eastern Residences, a 36-story tower at 377 feet. The new zoning doesn't just permit more of the same, it resets the ceiling for what gets built next to homes that, in some cases, have been on their lots since the 1950s.

Kane Realty, the developer behind two decades of North Hills growth, isn't waiting on that rezoning alone. The company broke ground in January 2026 on Tributary, a six-story, 332-unit apartment building with 6,000 square feet of ground-level retail at the corner of St. Albans Drive and Hardimont Road, part of a 28-acre expansion of the North Hills Innovation District that Kane and McCourt Partners acquired for $72 million. Filed site plans in that same expansion include Veranda, 207 units of housing for residents 55 and older, and Merit, 387 apartment units above two levels of parking with roughly 10,000 square feet of retail. As part of the approvals, Kane committed at least 10,000 square feet of open space in the Lassiter District, a $400,000 contribution to the Raleigh Fire Department, and $40,000 toward the city's affordable housing fund tied to a portion of the new units.

None of this is cosmetic for anyone evaluating a purchase here. More density changes the comparable-sales pool for years to come, and it changes it unevenly depending on which block you're standing on. It's also worth knowing that the infrastructure hasn't kept pace with the growth on its own timeline: the city canceled a planned widening of Six Forks Road in July 2025 after already spending $9 million on it, citing rising costs. If you're weighing a home near Six Forks Road or Lassiter Mill Road, the traffic pattern you see today is not necessarily the one you'll live with in three years, in either direction.

What This Means If You're Actually Shopping Here

If you're comparing North Hills against other Raleigh neighborhoods using a single median price, you're comparing the wrong thing. The more useful questions are:

• What product type am I actually looking at? A condo, a townhome, an established single-family home, or a teardown lot are four different investments wearing one neighborhood name.
• What sold in the last 90 days that matches my product type, not just my ZIP code?
• Is the block I'm considering within reach of the Innovation District expansion or the newly approved high-rise zones, and if so, what does that do to density and traffic over the next few years?
• If I'm looking at an older home on a larger lot, am I pricing the house, or am I pricing the land underneath it?

That last question matters more in North Hills than almost anywhere else in the Triangle. Thirty-plus custom builders are active in the area precisely because buyers keep proving that the lot is worth more than the structure sitting on it. If you're on the selling side of one of those older homes, understanding that distinction changes how you price and market the property. If you're buying, it changes what you should be willing to pay for square footage that might not survive the next owner's plans anyway.

A Few Questions Worth Asking Before You Make an Offer

Is North Hills and Midtown Raleigh the same thing? People use the names interchangeably, but North Hills usually refers to the mixed-use retail and residential core, while Midtown can describe a wider swath of central north Raleigh around it. Confirm which boundary a listing or a data source is actually using before you compare it to anything else.

Why do HOA fees vary so much between neighborhoods that are minutes apart? Condos carry mandatory HOAs that typically run $350 to $550 a month and cover exterior maintenance, amenities, water and sewer, and reserves. Single-family pockets like Bedford and North Hills Club areas have their own HOAs, while St. Albans and Drewry Hills operate on voluntary neighborhood associations instead, which changes what's actually enforced and what isn't.

Does the new zoning affect homes that aren't being redeveloped? Not directly, but it changes the comparable-sales environment around them, and it changes what future buyers will expect from the block. That's a conversation worth having with someone who tracks this submarket closely, not something to guess at from a listing photo.

North Hills rewards buyers and sellers who ask what kind of home they're actually pricing, not just where it sits. If you want a comparable-sales read built around your specific address and product type rather than a blended neighborhood average, DuBois Property Group can walk you through it. Schedule a consultation and we'll start with the numbers that actually apply to your situation.