The McLean Median Price Depends on Which McLean You're Asking About

At the March 17 meeting of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, Dranesville District Supervisor Jimmy Bierman pointed to a map of downtown McLean and told his colleagues why a small, awkward-shaped parcel at Beverly Road and Elm Street mattered more than its 0.56 acres suggested. "This is the center of the central center zone," he said, before the board voted unanimously to let a Reston developer tear down two aging office buildings and put up a seven-story building with 56 apartments and street-level retail.

That approval, and the rezoning application filed four months later for the block next door, are the reason McLean's home price data looks like it's arguing with itself right now. Check three different sources for "McLean home prices" this month and you'll get three different answers, and the gap isn't a data error. It's the sound of two housing markets, one built from large single-family lots and one built from Tysons-adjacent condo towers, getting flattened into a single town name.

Three Sources, Three Numbers

Zillow's home value index put the average McLean home at $1,472,788 as of July 31, 2026, up 1.4 percent over the year, with homes moving to pending in about 16 days. Redfin, measuring closed sales rather than an index, reported a median of $1.9 million over the three months ending May 2026, up 9.7 percent year over year, with price per square foot at $466. Listing-price trackers pegged the September 2026 figure closer to $1.72 million. Back in December 2025, one portal's listing median spiked to nearly $3 million in a single month, a number that says less about a sudden luxury boom than about how few homes close in McLean in any given month and how easily one estate sale can drag the average somewhere strange.

None of these sources are wrong. They're measuring different things: an index model, a closed-sale median, an active-listing median, each pulling from a small monthly pool that a handful of transactions can swing hard in either direction. But the deeper reason the numbers refuse to agree is that "McLean" isn't describing one product.

Two Zip Codes, One Name

In the same data pull that produced the March 2026 citywide figure, Zillow's own zip-level breakdown showed 22101 at $1,696,151 and 22102 at $841,470. That's roughly a two-to-one spread inside a single community name.

22101 covers the older, low-rise McLean that shows up in most people's mental image of the town: Langley Farms, Franklin Park, Chesterbrook Woods, Chesterbrook Gardens, Salona Village. These are neighborhoods where a 1950s or 1960s rancher on a half-acre lot is worth more torn down than renovated, and builders have been working through them lot by lot for years. Franklin Park in particular has become known for exactly this kind of teardown-rebuild cycle, mixing homes from the 1960s with newer construction on the same streets.

22102 is a different animal. It wraps around Tysons Corner and includes high-rise condo product like The Verse at The Boro, where floor plans have priced from roughly $690,000 to $3.9 million depending on floor and terrace, and older buildings like One Park Crest, where the average sale price runs closer to $760,000 at about $573 per square foot. It also still contains genuine estate-scale single-family streets, which is why the zip average sits well above what a studio condo alone would suggest. The zip code line is a useful shorthand for the mix effect, not a clean boundary between "condo" and "house."

The Mix Is Actively Changing

What makes this more than a one-time quirk in the data is that downtown McLean's housing stock is being rewritten in real time, and it's happening in more than one direction at once.

The Beverly Road project that Bierman championed will replace two commercial office buildings with 56 residential units, including at least seven workforce dwelling units set aside for moderate-income households, plus 2,120 square feet of ground-floor retail and a public plaza at the corner. Bierman noted the plaza could send more foot traffic toward existing downtown businesses, naming Aracosia and Dolce Vita Salon and Spa specifically as neighbors that stand to benefit.

The same March 17 meeting approved a second, very different project: Spring Hill Reserve, a Wormald Companies rezoning that clears the way for 14 new single-family houses on a site with roughly 2 acres of preserved open space, reached by a new private street that will also serve Baptist Charity Church.

And the pipeline isn't finished. A separate application covering 1.17 acres at 6816 and 6824 Elm Street, one block from the Beverly Road site, was accepted by the county on July 27, 2026, with a tentative Planning Commission hearing not scheduled until March 2027.

Three projects, filed within about a year of each other, adding both multifamily units and new single-family lots to the same few downtown blocks. That's not a market resolving into one clear direction. It's a market where the sales mix feeding next quarter's median is still being decided by a construction schedule, not by buyer demand alone.

What to Actually Compare

If you're using McLean's median price to size up the town against somewhere else you're considering, the townwide number will mislead you regardless of which portal it comes from. The more durable comparison is price per square foot within a specific subdivision or building, because it strips out some of the mix distortion that a raw median can't.

Redfin's $466 per square foot figure, drawn from the three months ending May 2026 and up 7.7 percent year over year, is a reasonable townwide baseline, but it still blends the Franklin Park teardown market with the Tysons high-rise market. A buyer comparing a Chesterbrook Gardens lot to a unit at The Verse is comparing two different products that happen to share a mailing address, not two points on the same curve.

The pace of the market is the one place where the two submarkets currently agree. Redfin reported homes selling in an average of 19 days over the same three-month window, down from 26 days a year earlier, with buyers submitting an average of two offers. Zillow's pending time of 16 days as of late July 2026 points the same direction. Whichever submarket a given buyer is shopping, both are still moving fast by national standards.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does the McLean median price include both condos and single-family homes? Yes. Every townwide figure cited above, whether from an index model or a closed-sale median, blends both housing types across all of McLean's zip codes. That blending is exactly why the same month can produce a $1.7 million figure from one source and a $1.35 million figure from another.

Will the new downtown apartments make McLean home prices lower? The Beverly Road project and the pending Elm Street application add rental and workforce housing units to the downtown business center, which is a different product than the resale single-family homes in Langley Farms or Franklin Park. New supply there is more likely to affect the condo and rental segment of the market than the large-lot single-family segment, at least in the near term.

What's a better number to use than the townwide median? Price per square foot within a specific subdivision, or a direct comparison to recently closed homes in the same zip code and school pyramid. A townwide median in a market with McLean's mix of housing types and monthly sales volume can shift for reasons that have nothing to do with whether values are rising or falling.

If you're trying to figure out what a specific McLean subdivision or condo building is actually worth right now, rather than what the townwide average says, Nelson Marban can walk through the recent comps for your exact street and building.