A buyer working through Kailua-Kona listings this fall can find two properties without much searching: a single-family home priced close to what it would have fetched a year ago, and a condo listed six figures below its 2025 peak. Same corridor. Same buyer pool. Two different corrections.
That split is the story local multiple listing data has been telling all year, and it is easy to miss if you only read the headline median. Kailua-Kona single-family homes closed the first half of 2026 at a year-to-date median of $1.225 million, down 6.1 percent from a year earlier. Condos closed the same stretch at a median of $570,000, down 12.3 percent, a price that pulls the market back to where it sat in 2023, after peaking near $694,000 in April 2025. One property type lost a little ground. The other gave back three years of appreciation.
The gap is not really about mortgage rates, even though rates get blamed for most of what slows a housing market down. Kona has never behaved like a typical rate-sensitive market. A meaningful share of buyers here are paying cash or buying a second home, which is part of why single-family pricing has stayed close to flat even as national headlines describe a cooling market. If financing costs were doing the heavy lifting, both property types would be moving together. They are not.
A Square Foot Isn't Worth the Same Thing Everywhere
Price per square foot strips out some of the noise that comes from a handful of high-end sales moving a small market's median around, and it tells a sharper version of the same story. A March 2026 snapshot put single-family price per square foot at $703, down 3.83 percent from the year before, with 5.9 months of supply on the ground. Condos in that same snapshot sat at $652 per square foot, down 10.56 percent, carrying 6.3 months of supply. By mid-2026, single-family supply had eased to 5.4 months, a range most agents would call balanced, while condo supply had widened to 7.7 months, solidly in buyer's market territory.
None of this means Kona buyers stopped wanting condos. It means the market has started pricing something into condos that it does not price into houses: the financial condition of the building itself.
The Three Costs a House Doesn't Carry
A single-family buyer inherits a roof, a foundation, and whatever maintenance the previous owner deferred. A condo buyer inherits all of that plus a share of a building's insurance bill, its reserve fund, and its compliance status with county rental rules. Three of those costs have gotten measurably heavier over the past two years, and none of them touch a detached house the same way.
Short-term rental compliance got a second layer. Hawai'i County's original vacation rental law, Ordinance 2018-114, known locally as Bill 108, set the zoning map back in 2018: short-term rentals are generally allowed in resort, commercial, and certain multifamily zones, and grandfathered rentals outside those zones can apply for a Nonconforming Use Certificate to keep operating. That law only ever governed unhosted rentals. In 2025 the county passed Ordinance 25-50, known as Bill 47, which added a mandatory registration requirement for every transient vacation rental on the island, hosted or not, with fines up to $10,000 for operating unregistered. The county pushed the compliance deadline to July 1, 2026, giving owners extra runway to register. By spring 2026, the council was already working on Bill 147, a further set of operational standards aimed specifically at hosted rentals, according to Honolulu Civil Beat's reporting on the council session. A condo buyer planning to rent a unit short-term now has to confirm not just the zoning, but a registration number, and watch for a regulatory framework that is still being written. A house buyer who plans to live in the home does not carry any of that.
Insurance and reserves have gotten harder to ignore. Statewide, aggregate property insurance premiums rose 13.4 percent in 2024, the largest single-year jump in at least a decade. On the Big Island, the Kona Low storms that hit in March and April 2026 added another round of pressure, and insurers have been recalibrating risk across the islands since. Condo insurance on the Kona coast currently runs roughly $450 to $800 a year outside lava hazard zones, and $800 to $3,000 or more inside Lava Flow Hazard Zones 1 and 2, where some standard carriers decline coverage altogether. Hawai'i law requires condo association reserve funds to sit at a minimum of 50 percent funded. That is a floor, not a target, and a building running near that floor is one bad storm season away from a special assessment. A single-family owner carries their own insurance policy and answers to no one else's reserve study.
Buyers are doing more homework before they write an offer. Agents working the Kona market this year describe buyers who are comparing fee schedules, asking for rental performance history, and reading reserve studies before they commit, instead of moving quickly the way they did during the tighter-inventory years. That extra step of diligence takes time, and time on market is exactly where condos are losing ground. Buyers are not rejecting condos. They are pricing the ones with real answers to those questions differently than the ones without.
Here is how the two segments compared during the first half of 2026:
| Metric | Single-family | Condo |
|---|---|---|
| Year-to-date median price (H1 2026) | $1.225 million | $570,000 |
| Change vs. prior year | down 6.1% | down 12.3% |
| Median price per square foot | $703 (down 3.83%) | $652 (down 10.56%) |
| Months of supply | 5.4 to 5.9 | 6.3 to 7.7 |
What This Looks Like Neighborhood by Neighborhood
The split does not run evenly across every Kailua-Kona sub-market either, because building structure matters more than the amenity level attached to the address. Historic Kailua Village, the walkable stretch of homes and small condo buildings anchored around Ali'i Drive, had 146 homes on the market as of spring 2026, with a median listing price of $728,000 and an average of 86 days on market. That figure blends both property types, and it sits close to the condo median rather than the house median, which tells you how much of that inventory is condo stock competing on price.
Kūkiʻo, the private club community on 675 acres with 143 home sites and 31 cottages, sits at the opposite end. Most of what sells there is ground-up ownership rather than shared-building product, so the insurance and reserve pressure hitting mid-market condos barely touches it. A buyer comparing neighborhoods on price alone will miss this. Two properties at the same price point can carry completely different exposure to the mechanisms driving the 2026 correction, depending on whether that price buys land and a roof or a unit inside someone else's building.
Before You Write an Offer on a Kona Condo
A few questions are worth asking before an offer goes in, not after:
- What percentage of the reserve fund is actually funded, and when was the last reserve study conducted?
- Has the association levied a special assessment in the past five years, and is one under discussion?
- What has the building's insurance premium done over the past three years, and has any carrier declined to renew?
- If the plan is short-term rental income, does the unit have an active county registration number or a valid Nonconforming Use Certificate, and does the building's own rules even allow rentals?
None of these questions apply to a detached single-family home the same way, which is a large part of why that segment has held its value while condos have not.
FAQ
Does this mean Kona condos are a bad investment right now? Not necessarily. It means the discount reflects real, checkable risk rather than a blanket market slowdown. A condo in a building with a fully funded reserve, clean insurance history, and current STR registration is a different asset than one without those things, even at the same list price.
Are single-family homes immune from these pressures? A homeowner still pays their own insurance premium and absorbs their own maintenance costs, and Hawai'i's rising premiums touch every property type. The difference is that a house owner controls those decisions directly instead of voting on them with dozens of other owners.
If you are weighing a condo against a house in Kailua-Kona this year, the honest starting point is not the median price, it is the building's paperwork. Hawai'i Estates can walk you through a specific building's reserve study, insurance history, and STR registration status before you write an offer, so the number you're negotiating against reflects what you're actually buying.
