Cupertino crossed a real threshold this year. After roughly a decade of ballot measures, lawsuits, and public hearings over what to do with the dead mall at Stevens Creek Boulevard and Wolfe Road, the developer behind The Rise told city officials that vertical construction is finally starting, with a target of 2026 and the first residents moving in as early as 2028. That number, 2,669 homes, is the one getting repeated in every conversation about what happens to Cupertino real estate next.
It is also the wrong number to fixate on if you are trying to figure out whether a resale listing near the old Vallco site is about to face new competition. The number that actually matters for that question is much smaller, arrives much later, and is a different kind of housing than what most Cupertino sellers are competing against today.
What 2,669 Actually Breaks Down Into
The full build-out of The Rise, still years from completion, calls for 2,669 residential units across a 50-acre site near Apple Park. But the first phase to move into construction permitting, known as Town Square West, is only 1,369 of those units. And within that first phase, the mix looks like this:
- 232 affordable rental apartments, the first building to reach a construction permit application
- 744 market-rate rental apartments
- 393 for-sale homes
Add those three categories and you get the 1,369 total for Town Square West. Only the last group, the 393 for-sale units, will ever show up on a Cupertino resale seller's radar as direct competition. The other 976 units in this phase are rentals, which compete for tenants, not buyers. Even generously assuming every unit in the full 2,669-home build-out eventually reaches for-sale status in the same roughly 29 percent ratio that Town Square West uses, the number of homes actually competing with an existing single-family listing in Cupertino is a fraction of the headline figure, not the whole of it.
The Timeline Matters as Much as the Ratio
The city approved a project modification in early 2026 that reduced office and retail space in favor of more market-rate homes, a change the developer described as necessary to keep the project financially viable given current conditions. That approval moved the project forward. It did not start construction.
The most recent action, a modification approved on August 24, 2026 covering Blocks 1 and 2, is an implementation-stage filing, not a new construction start. It refines building-level details like parking and access ahead of future permit submittals. That is a meaningfully earlier stage than "homes are for sale." A permit application has been submitted for the first affordable apartment building, and current project messaging points to construction beginning before the end of 2026, with the earliest occupancy around 2028 for the first phase only.
Stack the ratio and the timeline together and the picture sharpens. Not 2,669 new competitors to a resale listing. Not even 393. What arrives in the nearer term is a couple hundred for-sale units, in a mixed-use, higher-density format, with a delivery window measured in years rather than months.
The headline number describes what Cupertino will look like eventually. It does not describe what a seller is competing against this year, or likely next year either.
The Price Data Is Already Sending Mixed Signals, and That's the Real Story
Anyone pulling current numbers on Cupertino right now will notice something that looks like a contradiction. Over the three months ending August 2026, the citywide median sale price was $2.9 million, down 11.1 percent from the same period a year earlier, with the median price per square foot actually up 2.4 percent over the same stretch, and homes taking about 16 days to sell. Meanwhile, a separate measure of typical home value put the average Cupertino home value at just over $3.1 million as of July 2026, up 5.9 percent year over year.
Those two numbers are not really disagreeing about direction. They are measuring different things. A three-month median sale price moves with whatever mix of homes happened to close escrow in that window. A home value index tracks the trend for a consistent, typical property over time. When the type of home selling shifts, even briefly, toward smaller or lower-priced product, the median can dip while the underlying value of a stable single-family home keeps climbing.
That is exactly the kind of shift a project like The Rise introduces at the margins, well before its first unit is finished. Cupertino's own condo-heavy City Center submarket, for instance, posted a median sale price of $785,000 over the three months ending February 2026, down 32.3 percent from the same period the prior year, though that reading comes from a small number of transactions and swings hard on volume alone. New product entering a small, high-priced market changes what gets counted in the median long before it changes what a comparable single-family home is actually worth.
Where You Are in Cupertino Changes the Answer
Not every part of Cupertino sits the same distance from Wolfe Road, and the price data reflects it. Redfin's neighborhood breakdown for the three months ending June 2026 showed Cupertino's Eastside, the area closer to the Vallco site and Apple Park, at a $3.1 million median sale price, up 9.7 percent year over year, with homes selling in about 14 days. The Westside, further from the redevelopment, posted a higher median at $3.5 million, up a more modest 4.3 percent, with homes taking about 15 days to sell.
| Submarket | Median sale price (3 mo. ending June 2026) | YoY change | Avg. days on market |
|---|---|---|---|
| Eastside | $3.1M | +9.7% | 14 |
| Westside | $3.5M | +4.3% | 15 |
The Eastside carries the lower median but the faster price growth right now. That is not what you would expect if the market were pricing in a coming flood of nearby new supply as a drag on values. If anything, proximity to a project that is finally moving from paperwork to cranes seems to be adding a small premium to the pace of appreciation rather than subtracting from it. Read against the unit mix, that makes sense. A few hundred for-sale condos and townhomes arriving in 2028 in a walkable, amenity-rich district is a different product serving a different buyer than a single-family home on a quiet Eastside street, and the two aren't drawing from the same pool of interest.
What This Means If You're Comparing Cupertino to Somewhere Else
If you're weighing Cupertino against another South Bay city right now, the Vallco redevelopment is worth understanding, but not as a reason to delay a decision. The for-sale competition it introduces is small relative to the headline unit count, years away from delivery, and concentrated in a housing type that sits alongside the existing single-family stock rather than replacing it.
What is worth tracking, if you already own or are looking near the site, is the pace of the next few approvals. A building permit for the market-rate blocks, rather than another plan modification, will be the real signal that for-sale competition has an actual delivery date. Until then, the Eastside and Westside numbers reflect current supply and demand, not a market bracing for 2,669 new neighbors.
Frequently Asked Questions
Will The Rise lower home values near the old Vallco site? The current price data does not show that pattern. The Eastside, which sits closer to the redevelopment, posted faster year-over-year price growth than the Westside over the three months ending June 2026. The for-sale units at The Rise are also a different product type, higher-density and mixed-use, from the single-family homes that make up most of the nearby resale market.
When will homes at The Rise actually be available to purchase? The first phase, Town Square West, is targeting construction start before the end of 2026 with first occupancy around 2028, and that phase includes only 393 for-sale units out of 1,369 total. The rest of the full 2,669-home project has no confirmed construction timeline yet.
Is the 2,669 figure the number of homes competing with resale listings? No. Most of that total, including 744 market-rate apartments and 232 affordable apartments in the first phase alone, is rental housing that competes for tenants rather than buyers.
Should I wait to buy in Cupertino until The Rise is finished? Nothing in the current timeline or unit mix points to a reason to wait. Delivery is years out, the for-sale portion is a small share of the total, and the submarkets closest to the project are currently appreciating, not softening.
If you're weighing a move into Cupertino, or trying to figure out how a specific street or submarket stacks up against what's coming at The Rise, Rajiv Kohli can walk through the current numbers with you street by street. Schedule a consultation or request a free home valuation to see where your target neighborhood actually stands.
