Pull up three real estate sites and search the median home price in Cherry Creek right now. You will get three different answers, and none of them will be wrong.
One tracker puts the neighborhood's median list price at $1.27 million as of August 2026, down 15 percent from the month before and 15 percent from a year earlier. Another, tracking closed sales over the second quarter of 2026, shows a median sale price of $1.6 million, up 2.9 percent year over year, with homes selling in 23 days compared to 36 the year prior. A third source frames the whole neighborhood's range from entry-level condos near $700,000 up through penthouses that clear $10 million. Anyone comparing these numbers side by side could reasonably conclude the market is falling, rising, and simply too wide to describe all at once. It is doing all three, because the numbers aren't measuring the same thing.
Asking price, sold price, and a moving boundary line
The gap starts with what each number actually counts. A list-price median tracks what sellers are asking for right now, before negotiation. A sold-price median tracks what buyers actually paid, often on a three-month trailing window that includes closings negotiated weeks or months earlier. Those two figures will never match in a market where days on market is stretching out, and Cherry Creek's own numbers show exactly that stretch: 23 days in one quarter-over-quarter reading, 86 days in a same-month reading a few weeks later. Both are accurate. They're describing different points in the sale process.
Then there's the boundary problem. "Cherry Creek" gets used to describe the walkable condo and townhome core of Cherry Creek North, the single-family streets stretching south toward Polo Club and Denver Country Club, and everything in between, often in the same dataset. A median built from that mix tells you almost nothing about what a specific address will cost, because a $700,000 one-bedroom condo and a $3 million single-family home on a quarter-acre lot both count as one data point toward the same median.
What the building-level numbers actually show
The clearest way to see the spread is to skip the neighborhood median and look at individual closings. During the recent run of sales activity, a condo in the NorthCreek building closed at $666 per square foot, a record for that building. A unit at 155 Steele Street sold in the same stretch at $1,218 per square foot, nearly double that NorthCreek number a few blocks away. A duplex on Columbine Street sold at $752 per square foot above ground back in 2020, a figure that still holds up as high six years later. In February 2026, a duplex at 411 Madison Street sold for $2,925,000, the highest attached-home sale in the area that month. And in October 2025, a penthouse at The Laurel sold for $10.1 million.
Put those five numbers next to each other and the "median home price" starts to look less like a fact and more like a rounding exercise. A scraped, ground-up contemporary build sitting next to an untouched 1950s brick ranch on the same block can produce two "Cherry Creek" comps that tell opposite stories about what the street is worth. Cherry Creek's residential stock is genuinely mixed this way: Tudor and Colonial Revival homes from the 1920s and 1940s, brick ranches from the 1950s and 1960s, and a growing share of scrape-and-rebuild contemporary homes replacing older houses on the same streets. Pricing or evaluating a specific property here means asking for comps sorted by construction era and exact sub-area, not by zip code.
A thin market moves on one or two sales
There's a second reason the headline numbers swing so hard: Cherry Creek doesn't sell very many homes in a given month. A market recap that circulated in January 2026 reported a 223.5 percent year-over-year jump in Cherry Creek North home prices, a number that sounds like a typo until you realize what produces it. When a monthly median is built from a dozen or so closings, changes in which homes sell can move the median sharply. A market averaging thousands of closings a month absorbs changes in the sales mix more easily. A market averaging low double digits does not.
That thinness is also, in part, a policy story. Colorado spent years as a difficult place to build for-sale condominiums, because the state's construction defect liability rules made it easy for homeowners associations to sue developers over building defects. Insurance costs for condo projects climbed high enough that many developers simply stopped building condos and built rental apartments instead, since rental buildings carry less of that legal exposure. That history is part of why a new for-sale condo project in Cherry Creek North is genuinely notable news rather than routine construction.
The building that's about to change the comps
Which brings us to 185 Steele Street. In November 2025, developer PMG broke ground on the Waldorf Astoria Residences Denver Cherry Creek, a 37-unit condominium building backed by $107.5 million in construction financing from Maxim Capital Group. Presales had already pushed the building past 60 percent sold by the time crews broke ground. PMG had originally explored a rezoning path that would have allowed an eight-story building; after feedback from the Cherry Creek North Design Advisory Board, the project settled at its by-right height of five stories and 37 residences instead. Completion is targeted for the first quarter of 2028.
A single 37-unit building won't move a neighborhood median on its own. What it signals is more useful than the unit count: capital is willing to finance branded, for-sale luxury condominiums in Cherry Creek North again, in a state where that kind of project has been rare for years. When it closes, it will add a cluster of same-vintage, same-building comps that don't currently exist anywhere in the neighborhood's sales history.
The residential story is playing out against an unusually active commercial one next door. Nick LeMasters, president and CEO of the Cherry Creek North Business Improvement District, described the financing environment plainly in comments to Denverite: "There's nothing in America like what's happening in Cherry Creek North right now, where a developer or investors can come into the neighborhood, acquire land, build an office building, get it financed and get it leased and then get it open."
The numbers back that up. Cherry Creek North's office vacancy rate dropped to 1.3 percent in 2025, against a 29 percent office vacancy rate in downtown Denver that same year, according to the Downtown Denver Partnership. Retail vacancy in the district sat at 1.9 percent. Eight development projects were under construction as of the district's most recent State of Cherry Creek report, with eight more announced. Two blocks away, crews are turning the former Sears site into a mix of roughly 380 housing units alongside stores and restaurants, part of a larger 13-acre Cherry Creek West redevelopment converting vacant storefronts and parking lots into housing, office, and retail space.
None of this changes what a specific house is worth today. It changes what the next few years of comps will look like, as new residential density lands at the neighborhood's western edge and pulls buyer attention, and inventory, along with it.
What to ask for instead of a median
If you're comparing Cherry Creek to another Denver neighborhood, or trying to price a specific listing here, the headline median is a starting point, not an answer. Before trusting any number, it helps to ask:
- Is this a list-price median or a sold-price median, and over what window?
- Does this figure cover Cherry Creek North's walkable core, the broader residential streets, or both combined?
- How many closings make up this month's sample? A dozen sales behaves very differently than a few hundred.
- What construction era is the comp set drawing from, and does it match the home in question?
Those four questions matter more here than in most Denver neighborhoods, because Cherry Creek combines a small sales volume, a wide range of housing stock, and a genuine construction boom all at once. You can read more about the everyday side of the neighborhood, including the Fillmore Plaza activity reshaping its western half, in our look at Cherry Creek's Fall 2026 season, or start with our Cherry Creek neighborhood guide for a fuller picture of what different blocks actually offer.
If you're weighing an offer or pricing a listing in Cherry Creek and want comps that actually reflect the building, block, and era you're working with rather than a zip-code average, Lauren Basford can walk through the current data with you street by street.
