A two bedroom unit at Maui Banyan hit the market this year asking $1.2 million. It sat for 332 days. When it finally closed, the price was $900,000, a $300,000 gap between what the seller wanted and what the market actually paid.
That unit is not an outlier because it lost money. It is an outlier because of how long it took to find that out. Across Kihei right now, condos that open at an accurate number are closing in a median of 63 days at 97.7 percent of their original asking price. Condos that end up cutting 10 percent or more from their opening price take a median of 201 days and close at 79.5 percent. The Maui Banyan listing landed almost exactly where that second group lands, just with a bigger sticker price attached to the lesson.
That gap between fast, clean closings and long, expensive ones is the real story in Kihei this year, and it explains something in the data that looks like a contradiction if you only read the headline number.
The Headline Number Nobody Should Read Alone
The Kihei condo median sale price was $771,500 for the full year 2024. It fell to $655,000 in 2025. Through August 2026 it sits at $600,000, according to the Realtors Association of Maui's area-level reporting, which tracks Kihei separately from the islandwide figure. That's roughly a 22 percent drop from full-year 2024 to the first eight months of 2026.
If that were the whole story, you'd expect a market where fewer buyers are showing up to catch a falling knife. Instead, the opposite happened. Kihei condo sales are up 21 percent this year, with 198 closings through August against 164 over the same period a year earlier. Prices fell while the number of people actually buying went up.
That combination doesn't fit the simple version of a soft market. A median that drops while sales climb is telling you something more specific than "the market is weak." It's telling you that what's selling has changed, not just what it's selling for.
What Moved the Median
A median price is not one number tracking one thing getting cheaper. It's the middle point of whatever mix of sales happened to close in a given window. When the mix shifts, the median shifts with it, even if no individual seller cut their price by a matching amount.
In Kihei, the buildings that carry full short-term rental rights, meaning hotel or resort-zoned complexes where an owner can legally rent nightly, still command the highest asking prices in the market. But those are also the buildings where buyer interest has cooled the most. The apartment-zoned buildings, the ones without vacation rental rights and restricted to stays of 181 days or longer, are where the active buyers actually are right now.
That split matters because it means a big share of this year's added sales volume came from the lower end of the price range, not the high end. More transactions happening in the cheaper, no-rental-rights segment pulls the overall median down even if the STR-eligible buildings haven't repriced by anywhere near that much. The market isn't uniformly 22 percent cheaper. The composition of who's buying what has changed, and the median is reporting that shift as if it were a single downward move.
The Cost of Guessing Wrong on the Opening Price
The building-level split shows up clearly in how differently priced listings perform once they hit the market. Here's what the pattern looks like across 714 closed Kihei condo sales from January 2024 through September 2026:
| Closed with no price cut | Closed after cutting 10%+ | |
|---|---|---|
| Median days on market | 63 | 201 |
| Sale price vs. original ask | 97.7% | 79.5% |
This is an association, not a guarantee that overpricing alone caused every slow sale. Condition, seller motivation and the specific building all play a role. But the pattern holds across the full data set, and it lines up with what happened at Maui Banyan. A unit priced to what a comparable STR-eligible listing might have fetched a year or two earlier, rather than to where buyer demand actually sits today, doesn't just sell for less eventually. It sells for less after burning through most of a year on market, which is its own cost in carrying fees, HOA dues and opportunity.
For a buyer, that 201-day, 79.5 percent column is where the negotiating room lives. A listing that's already six or seven months in with no offers is a different conversation than one that hit the market three weeks ago.
The Slowdown Isn't Uniform Either
The building-by-building differences show up even within a single price tier. Kihei Villages, a group of six sub-buildings (Kihei Villages I through VI) that trade in the lower-to-mid condo range, saw its average sold price fall from roughly $512,000 in 2025 to roughly $465,000 in the first four months of 2026, about a 9 percent drop. Days on market stretched from 87 to 144 over the same comparison, and the sale-to-list ratio slipped from about 95 percent to about 93 percent.
Those numbers move in the same direction as the citywide median, but at a different pace and for a different reason. This is a lower-priced complex where the softening shows up mostly as buyers taking their time, not as a wave of bargain hunters flooding in. It's a reminder that no single building, including the ones getting the most attention right now, tells you what's happening two streets over. The Kihei condo market isn't one market with one temperature. It's a set of buildings that happen to share a zip code.
What This Means If You're Comparing Two Similar-Priced Listings
Two Kihei condos at the same asking price can be sitting in completely different positions depending on what building they're in and how long they've been listed. Before treating a price tag as the whole picture, it's worth checking a few things that the number alone won't tell you:
- Whether the building carries hotel, resort, or apartment zoning, since that determines whether short-term rental use is even legal there
- How long the specific listing has been on market and whether the price has already been cut once or twice
- Where the building's own recent closings landed relative to original ask, not just the citywide median
There's a broader supply signal worth watching too. Maui condo inventory stood at 839 units at the end of August 2026, about 4 percent below a year earlier, and months of supply fell from 15.5 in August 2025 to 12.2 in August 2026, down from a twelve-month high of 15.9 in January. Buyer activity in real estate tends to move ahead of price by roughly two to four quarters, so a market where closings are climbing while inventory tightens is often an early signal rather than a late one. That doesn't mean every Kihei building is about to reprice higher. It means the buildings where buyers are already showing up in numbers are the ones most likely to see pricing firm up first.
A few questions I hear often
Does rising sales volume mean Kihei condo prices are about to go up? Not immediately, and not everywhere at once. Buyer activity has historically moved ahead of price by something like two to four quarters, so this year's volume increase is worth watching rather than dismissing. But it's showing up unevenly by building, which means any recovery is likely to arrive unevenly too.
Why did some Kihei complexes drop in price while others held roughly steady? Zoning is the biggest factor. Buildings with short-term rental rights have been carrying higher price expectations that buyer demand hasn't fully supported this year, leading to bigger cuts on the units that overpriced. Buildings without rental rights, which draw a different buyer, mostly owner-occupiers and long-term rental investors, have seen more consistent buyer interest even as prices have softened more gradually.
How can I tell if a specific Kihei condo can be used as a short-term rental? The zoning classification and any Minatoya List or Bill 9 (Ordinance 5909) status need to be confirmed for the specific unit, since this varies building by building and even sometimes unit by unit within a complex. Don't assume based on the listing photos or the building's reputation.
If you're weighing two Kihei listings that look similar on paper and want a straight read on what each building's price history actually says, Steve Landin can pull the specific comps and pricing pattern for the buildings you're considering before you write an offer.
