Bill Gates has quietly put a slice of his Medina, Washington, holdings on the market, listing a waterfront-adjacent home for $4.8 million just steps from his primary compound. The move offers a rare glimpse into how one of the world’s most closely watched billionaires manages real estate around a property that has long fascinated both neighbors and tech-watchers.
Rather than signaling a retreat from the area, the listing highlights how carefully curated the Gates footprint has become along this exclusive stretch of Lake Washington, where even a relatively modest house carries outsized symbolic weight next to his famed estate.
The $4.8 million neighbor to Xanadu 2.0
The newly listed residence sits in Medina, the small, tree-lined city on the eastern shore of Lake Washington that has become shorthand for Pacific Northwest wealth. In this enclave of gated driveways and private docks, a $4.8 million asking price places the property firmly in the upper tier, yet still well below the value of the neighboring Gates compound. The home is described in marketing materials as a carefully maintained, livable house rather than a trophy mega-mansion, which makes its proximity to one of the most famous private residences in the world all the more striking.
According to reporting on the sale, the listing is framed explicitly as a Washington property adjacent to Gates’s primary estate, with the price set at $4.8 and the home presented as a rare opportunity to live next to his long-time base. Coverage credits writer Geoffrey Montes and notes that the story was prepared on a Thu in Feb in the PST time zone, underscoring how fresh the information about the offering is. The piece on the $4.8 listing emphasizes that this is not a distant investment but a direct neighbor to the tech founder’s main residence, effectively turning the sale into a referendum on what it means to live in the shadow of one of the world’s best known private homes.
Medina’s ultra-exclusive shoreline
To understand why this particular sale matters, it helps to look at Medina itself, a city that occupies a narrow peninsula facing downtown Seattle across Lake Washington. With a population that barely registers on a metropolitan scale, the community has nonetheless become a global reference point for concentrated wealth, thanks to its secluded streets, limited public access, and a shoreline lined with some of the most expensive residential properties in the Pacific Northwest. The geography of Medina means there is a finite amount of waterfront and view property, which magnifies the impact whenever a high profile owner decides to sell…