A buyer touring a two-bedroom condo in Orenco Station this month will find six units on the market, priced between $265,000 and $399,900, sitting for an average of 61 days before anyone makes an offer. Three miles south, a family touring a new build in Reed's Crossing will see a different pace entirely: builders there have sold more than 1,470 homes since breaking ground in 2018, and they're on track to sell roughly 175 more before the year is out.
Same city. Same school district boundaries in places. Completely different rhythm.
The headline number for Hillsboro right now, a median sale price of $548,000 over the three months ending in August 2026, up 5.6% from a year earlier, makes the city sound like one steady market moving in one direction. It isn't. That figure is an average of two submarkets that are behaving nothing alike, and if you're trying to time a purchase or price a listing based on the citywide number alone, you're working with information that doesn't describe either half of the story.
The Same City, Two Very Different Timelines
Start with what buyers actually see when they search by neighborhood instead of by city.
Orenco Station, the walkable, transit-oriented community built around the Orenco MAX stop, has a 12-month median sale price of $500,000, down 8% from the previous 12-month period. Break it down by property type and the picture holds: condos are running a median of $517,450 as of September 2026 with 61 days average on market, and single-family homes in the neighborhood carried a median of $524,950 in June 2026 with an average of 73 days before selling. Homes there are taking noticeably longer to move than the national average of 58 days, and the year-over-year direction is down, not up.
South Hillsboro tells a different story. Reed's Crossing, the 463-acre master-planned community that's now Oregon's largest mixed-use development by density, closed out 2025 with what its developers described as continued sales momentum despite a difficult year for the broader industry. The Model Home Village opened in early 2026. Twenty of the twenty-three announced businesses in the Town Center retail district were open by the end of 2025, with the rest slated to lease up by the end of this year. Builders there, including David Weekley Homes, Holt Homes, Lennar, Richmond American Homes and Stone Bridge Homes NW, are still moving inventory at a pace that has nothing to do with the slowdown showing up three miles north.
| Orenco Station (resale) | Hillsboro citywide | Reed's Crossing / South Hillsboro (new construction) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Median price | $500,000 (12-mo, down 8% YoY) | $548,000 (3-mo trailing, Aug 2026, up 5.6% YoY) | Mid-$300s to $1M+, homes actively selling |
| Days on market | 61-73 days depending on property type | 22 days average | Builders project ~175 new sales in 2026 alone |
| Trend direction | Softening | Rising on paper | Steady since 2018 groundbreaking |
The citywide median sits almost exactly between those two realities, which is exactly the problem. It tells you nothing about which neighborhood you're actually looking at.
What Actually Split the Market
The split has a specific cause, and it isn't mysterious once you look at who employs the people buying and selling homes in each pocket of the city.
Intel has cut its Oregon workforce sharply over the past two years. In August 2024, the company eliminated roughly 1,300 Oregon positions as part of a global reduction of 15,000 jobs. Cuts continued into 2025: an initial notice in early July disclosed about 529 layoffs across four Oregon campuses, then Intel revised that number upward on July 11 to 2,392 positions, broken down as 1,521 from the Ronler Acres campus, 519 from Jones Farm, 192 from Aloha, and 160 from Hawthorn Farm, according to OPB's reporting at the time. That single round represented more than 10% of the company's Oregon workforce, and the Hillsboro News Times noted it ranked among the largest mass layoffs in state history.
Orenco Station, AmberGlen, and the neighborhoods clustered near those four campuses were built, in a very literal sense, around proximity to Intel employment. When several thousand of those jobs disappeared in under a year, the ripple didn't stop at the people who were laid off. Buyers who work at Intel, or who know people who do, got more cautious about committing to a neighborhood that reads as economically tied to one employer's fortunes. That caution shows up in the data as longer days on market and softer prices, which is precisely what the Orenco Station numbers reflect.
An appraisal analysis using original RMLS data described this pattern directly: when new-construction sales are excluded from Hillsboro's citywide figures, existing condominium and attached resale properties show consistent price declines and meaningfully longer marketing periods, a pattern the analysis attributed to measurable external obsolescence tied to the employment shock. In plain terms, the resale market near Intel is absorbing a real shock that the citywide average is currently hiding.
Why New Construction Never Felt the Shock
Reed's Crossing wasn't insulated from the Intel news by luck. It was insulated by timing.
Most of the homes selling in South Hillsboro today were planned, entitled, and financed years before Intel's 2024-2025 layoffs began. The community broke ground in 2018 and has been building out in phases ever since, which means builders there aren't reacting to this month's employment headlines, they're executing on land use approvals and infrastructure investments that predate the layoffs by half a decade. Roads, stoplights, and a new pedestrian and vehicle bridge connecting sections of the community were completed throughout 2025 as part of that longer-term buildout, not as a response to labor market conditions.
There's a second force at work too, and it's one that speaks directly to why a construction-minded buyer should care. When someone compares an older resale home in Orenco, one that may need a new roof or an HVAC system replaced in the next few years, against a brand-new home in Reed's Crossing with builder warranties and systems installed this year, the calculation isn't just about square footage or price per foot. It's about which deferred maintenance costs are baked into the purchase and which ones aren't. New construction is winning that comparison right now, not because it's cheaper, but because it removes a category of risk that resale buyers in an uncertain-feeling submarket are less willing to absorb.
What This Means If You're Choosing a Side of Hillsboro
If you're weighing a purchase or a listing in Hillsboro, the neighborhood-level data matters more than the citywide headline in almost every decision you'll make.
Buyers looking at Orenco Station and similar Intel-adjacent pockets aren't stepping into a collapsing market. They're stepping into a resale market where longer negotiating windows and more price flexibility are realistic, and where a clear-eyed look at a home's roof age, HVAC condition, and other deferred maintenance items should shape the offer. That's a market where a construction-literate read on a property, not just a comp sheet, earns its keep.
Sellers in that same pocket are better served pricing to the neighborhood's actual current pace, 60 to 75 days depending on property type, rather than to a citywide figure that's being pulled upward by activity happening somewhere else in the city. Homes that are priced and prepped with that reality in mind move faster than homes priced against last year's Intel-boom comps.
Buyers drawn to South Hillsboro's momentum should understand that the pace they're seeing reflects a multi-year planning pipeline, not necessarily a permanent structural advantage. As that pre-layoff pipeline of entitled land eventually clears, over the coming years South Hillsboro's numbers may start to look more like the rest of the city's than they do today.
Neither half of Hillsboro is the whole story. Knowing which half you're standing in changes the questions worth asking before you write an offer or set a list price.
FAQ
Does a longer days-on-market number in Orenco Station mean prices there will keep falling? The 12-month median in Orenco Station is down 8% from the prior year, and homes are taking longer to sell than the national average. Whether that trend continues depends heavily on Intel's next moves and on how buyers price in employment risk over the coming year, which makes this a market where a recent, neighborhood-specific comparison matters more than a citywide trend line.
Is Reed's Crossing's pace guaranteed to last? Builders there project roughly 175 more home sales in 2026, continuing a pattern of steady sales that predates the current employment story. That pace reflects a development pipeline planned years in advance rather than a response to current conditions, so it's worth watching how demand holds up as the community approaches its later phases.
Should I rule out an Intel-adjacent neighborhood entirely? Not necessarily. Longer marketing periods and softer prices can also mean more room to negotiate and less competition for buyers who are comfortable evaluating a resale home's condition realistically rather than assuming new-construction certainty.
If you're trying to figure out which side of this split your next move falls on, or what a specific Hillsboro property's age and condition actually mean for your offer or your asking price, that's exactly the kind of conversation worth having before you write a number down. Josh Halemeier can walk through the comps for your specific pocket of Hillsboro and what they mean for your timeline. Schedule a free consultation to talk it through.
