Millbrae Home Prices Are Telling Two Different Stories Right Now. Here's Why.
September 10, 2026
September 10, 2026
The front desk at the El Rancho Inn stopped taking reservations in the spring. For decades, travelers checked into the Mission Revival hotel on El Camino Real for its "Park, Sleep, and Fly" package and, if they were lucky, a seat at the Mermaid Room bar, where a window looked straight into the underwater half of the pool. The bar's submerged view made a cameo in the 1983 film "The Right Stuff." Richard Nixon and Joan Crawford both stayed here over the hotel's run, which began in 1948. City Manager Tom Williams confirmed the property changed hands on April 22 this year, with demolition following in May. In its place: a five-story, 384-unit apartment building on the same 5.55 acres, 19 of those units reserved for very low income households.
That single lot is a physical version of something happening in Millbrae's price data right now. Pull up three different sources for what Millbrae homes are worth this year and you will get three different answers, and not by a small margin.
| Where | Median sale price | Year-over-year | What's actually driving it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Millbrae, citywide | $1.6M (January 2026) | down 7.6% | a blended average across every home type and vintage in the city |
| Downtown Millbrae | $884K (three months ending May 2026) | up 37.0% | only 4 homes sold in that window, so one or two deals swing the median hard |
| Millbrae Meadows | $2.5M (three months ending May 2026) | up 21.0% | price per square foot actually fell 4.4%, meaning bigger houses sold, not pricier ones |
Zillow's own automated valuation model can't settle on a single figure either. One version of its Millbrae estimate, updated May 31, 2026, put the typical home value at $2,082,827, up 5.5% year-over-year. Another version of the same tool put it at $1,928,074, down 8.5% year-over-year. That's a swing of more than $150,000 for what is supposed to be the same city. Whether that gap comes from the timing of each snapshot or a slightly different geographic boundary, the lesson holds either way: right now, no single number describes Millbrae.
The reason the numbers disagree isn't that buyers can't decide whether they like Millbrae. It's that Millbrae is mid-transformation, and two very different kinds of inventory are moving through escrow at the same time.
One market is the legacy stock: single-family homes on fixed lots in neighborhoods like Millbrae Meadows, where no new supply is coming because there's no land left to build on. When a handful of larger homes trade in a given quarter, the median jumps, not because buyers are suddenly paying more per square foot, but because bigger houses are what happened to sell.
The other market is brand new and concentrated almost entirely around the BART and Caltrain station. When Trammell Crow broke ground on the 278-unit One Meadow Glen at 959 El Camino Real, a company principal called it "the first multifamily start in Millbrae since the pandemic." That description tells you how long the city went without adding this kind of housing, and how much is now arriving at once.
The station-area buildout goes well beyond one project. Here's what's entitled, under construction, or moving through permit review as of this year:
Add it up and it's easy to see why the city's housing numbers look the way they do. Millbrae is under a state mandate to permit 2,199 new homes by 2031. As of a March 2026 progress report, the city had issued permits for roughly 408 of those units, about 18 percent of the total, though projects that are entitled but not yet permitted push that share closer to half. In other words, most of what's listed above hasn't delivered yet. The story isn't that Millbrae has already flooded with new supply. It's that the flood is scheduled, and buyers and sellers making decisions today are pricing a city that's still mid-change.
If you're shopping for a single-family home in a neighborhood like Millbrae Meadows, you're competing for a shrinking, fixed pool of inventory that isn't affected by anything happening near the station. The 21 percent jump in that neighborhood's median says less about demand accelerating and more about which specific houses happened to close. Don't read a headline percentage as a verdict on your negotiating position without asking what actually sold.
If you're looking at new construction near the transit hub, understand that more of it is still coming. One Meadow Glen, the El Rancho Inn replacement, Serra Station, and the Gateway project will deliver hundreds of additional units over the next several years, on a timeline that depends heavily on how quickly entitled projects convert to permits. That's useful context before assuming a new unit's price today reflects scarcity that may not hold once the next building opens.
There's also a nearer-term, practical consideration. If you're buying or already own a home adjacent to any of these sites, expect construction noise and access disruption while these projects move from demolition and entitlement toward completion. That's not a reason to avoid the area, but it's the kind of detail worth asking about before you write an offer near El Camino Real.
For sellers of older Millbrae homes, the new construction wave changes the competitive set in a different way. Buyers touring a 1960s single-family house are increasingly doing so with a freshly built apartment or condo as their mental comparison point, not another older home down the block. A dated kitchen or original bathroom reads differently against that backdrop than it did five years ago. This is part of why NEXTGEN built financed pre-sale renovation options into our seller process, so a home competing against new construction can compete on the finishes buyers are already comparing it to, without the seller fronting the cost upfront.
Does all this new construction mean Millbrae home values will fall? Not necessarily, and the data so far doesn't show that pattern. What it does show is that averages calculated across the whole city will keep looking noisy as new, generally smaller-footprint units enter the sales mix alongside larger legacy homes. A softer citywide median can coexist with strong performance in specific neighborhoods, which is exactly what's happening right now.
Is now a good time to buy in Millbrae? That depends entirely on which Millbrae you mean. A legacy single-family home in a neighborhood with no new supply behaves like a scarce asset. A new-construction unit near the station is entering a market where more comparable inventory is still on the way. Neither answer is right or wrong, but they're different enough that the citywide median shouldn't be the only number guiding your decision.
Millbrae is not a single market to read off a headline number this year. It's two markets sharing a zip code, moving at different speeds, and the gap between them is only going to matter more as the next few hundred units come online.
If you're weighing a move into or out of Millbrae and want a read on what a specific block or building type is actually doing right now, rather than a citywide blend, NEXTGEN Properties can walk through it with you. Book a complimentary home strategy session and we'll bring the neighborhood-level data, not just the average.
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