Pull up six real estate data sources for Colonial Village on the same afternoon and you will land on six different numbers. All of them come from real closed sales or real active listings. None of them are fabricated. And none of them, taken alone, tell you what a house on Kalmia Road or Primrose Drive is actually worth.
That is not a data quality problem. It is a boundary problem. Colonial Village is small enough, and sells slowly enough, that every website drawing a number has quietly drawn its own map first. Change the map even slightly and the number changes with it. For anyone pricing a listing here or sizing up an offer, understanding which map you are looking at matters more than the number itself.
Six Sources, Six Different Numbers
Here is what a buyer or seller would find checking the usual places in the first half of 2026:
| Source | Time Window | Reported Figure | What's Actually Included |
|---|---|---|---|
| Zip-code analysis (20012) | Q1 2026 | Median $807,500, average $874,907 | Colonial Village plus Takoma and Shepherd Park |
| Portal trailing-12-month figure, first crawl | As of May 2026 | Median $1,247,500, down 4% year over year | Colonial Village only, per that site's boundary |
| Same portal, second crawl | As of May 2026 | Median $1,375,000, average $1,304,375 | Colonial Village only, a different snapshot |
| Portal trailing-12-month figure, separate page | Trailing 12 months | Average $1,462,780, down 10% year over year | Colonial Village only, yet another boundary draw |
| Combined-neighborhood aggregator | April 2026 | Median $1,099,591, down 4.4% year over year | Colonial Village blended with Shepherd Park |
| Active MLS listings | June 2026 | Median list price $2,100,000, across 3 homes | Colonial Village only, actives at that moment |
Two of those rows come from the same website, pulled within weeks of each other, and they still disagree by more than $100,000. That alone should tell you something about how much weight any single figure deserves here.
Why the Boundary Keeps Moving
Part of the problem is that nobody fully agrees where Colonial Village starts and stops. One local real estate description places its edges at Portal Drive to the north, Rock Creek Park to the west and south, and 16th Street to the east. Another puts the northern edge at the Maryland-DC line instead, the southern edge at Holly Street rather than the park, and the western edge at Beach Drive. Those are not small rounding differences. They shift which houses count.
The neighborhood also has no Metro stop and no signage marking where it begins, which is part of why even longtime Washingtonians west of Rock Creek Park have never heard of it. There is nothing physical forcing every data provider toward the same line on a map, so each one draws its own.
Then there is North Portal Estates, the adjacent enclave built later, in the 1950s and 1960s, as its own distinct subdivision. Today it shows up constantly folded into Colonial Village listings. One current listing is marketed as "New Construction in the North Portal Estates Neighborhood of Colonial Village." Another describes itself simply as being at the "border of North Portal Estates and Colonial Village." Two historically separate places, sold today under one name, in one dataset, feeding one median.
The Zip Code Doing the Heavy Lifting
The most dramatic number on that table, the $807,500 median from the first quarter of 2026, comes from zip code 20012, and 20012 is not Colonial Village. Depending on which local description you read, it also contains Shepherd Park, Takoma, and in some accounts Brightwood as well. That analysis attributed its gains to detached-home sales in the zip code nearly doubling, with transaction volume up 20% to 36 sales in the quarter compared to 30 the year before. That is a real, useful fact about the zip code. It is not a fact about Colonial Village's roughly 80 original houses or the broader collection of colonials, Cape Cods, and ranches that carry the name today.
This is also not new behavior for 20012. The same zip code has topped similar appreciation rankings in prior years, and each time the explanation traced back to which type of home happened to close that particular quarter, not to a sustained shift in what any single street is worth. A zip code aggregating four different housing markets is going to swing hard every time the mix of what sold changes, and Colonial Village's detached colonials are exactly the kind of higher-priced inventory that can tilt a shared zip code's median without three or four of those sales even happening inside Colonial Village itself.
Three Houses Can Move a Median
The clearest illustration of how thin this market runs is the active inventory itself. As of June 2026, the entire pool of MLS-listed homes carrying the Colonial Village name in one local snapshot was three properties: 1702 Kalmia Road NW at $2,350,000, 2035 Parkside Drive NW at $2,100,000, and 7746 16th Street NW at $2,099,900, a nearly 7,300-square-foot house believed to be the largest in the neighborhood. The median list price across those three homes was $2,100,000.
A separate count around the same period found seven Colonial Village houses for sale in total, ranging from $899,900 to $2,595,000, with a trailing-12-month median in the $1.2 million to $1.4 million range depending on the crawl. Move one large house in or out of a pool that size and the median moves with it. That is simply what happens when your sample size is measured in single digits rather than dozens.
What This Means If You're Pricing a Sale or Sizing Up an Offer
If you are preparing to list a house in Colonial Village, the zip code median is not your comp set, and neither is a combined "Colonial Village-Shepherd Park" figure from a portal that never asks whether the two markets actually behave the same way. The number that matters is the handful of closed sales on architecturally similar homes, ideally on a comparable lot, ideally not blended with a Takoma bungalow or a North Portal Estates mid-century contemporary that happens to share a mailing boundary.
The same caution applies if you are the one making an offer. Ask what specific homes went into any comp analysis you're shown, not just what neighborhood name was attached to them. With inventory this thin, an appraiser working a purchase contract may need to reach into an adjacent enclave to find enough comparable sales, and a good agent should be able to walk you through exactly why a given comp does or does not apply to the house in front of you. In a market this small, that conversation is worth more than any single median you'll find online.
A Few Common Questions
Is Colonial Village the same neighborhood as Shepherd Park? No. They are historically distinct areas, separated by 16th Street, though several data providers report them together because they share the same broad market and overlapping zip code coverage.
Why doesn't Colonial Village have its own Metro stop? The neighborhood is zoned entirely residential, with no retail corridor to anchor transit. The closest station is in Silver Spring, just over the Maryland line.
How many homes actually sell in Colonial Village each year? Not many. Active inventory has run as low as three to seven homes at a given time in recent counts, which is exactly why a single reported median can swing so widely from one source, or even one crawl, to the next.
If you are trying to price a home in Colonial Village or evaluate whether an asking price reflects the actual house in front of you rather than a blended zip-code average, that is a conversation worth having before you set a number. Matthew Paschall has spent more than two decades reading Washington's neighborhoods block by block, and can walk you through which comps genuinely apply to your street. Let's Connect.
