Anyone who toured The Estuary between June 1 and July 20 this year did it by detour. The George Bush Boulevard bascule bridge, the drawbridge that sits at the community's northern edge, was closed to both vehicles and pedestrians for nearly seven weeks while Palm Beach County crews handled deck repairs. Cars and foot traffic got routed around by Federal Highway, Atlantic Avenue, and Ocean Boulevard. Boats kept moving underneath the whole time. It was a small, temporary inconvenience for a gated community that otherwise reads as insulated from the rest of Delray Beach's daily friction.

It is also a useful reminder before you go shopping for a number. The Estuary is 104 Mediterranean-style townhomes built in the early 2000s, wrapped around two lakes and a stretch of the Intracoastal Waterway, a short walk from Atlantic Avenue. It looks, from the portal listing, like a single product with a single price. It is not. And the gap between how the market reports that price and what actually happened at closing is worth understanding before you anchor on any figure you see.

The Number Changes Depending on When You Look

Pull up two snapshots of the same community, taken six months apart, and you get two different stories. One dataset, current as of January 2026, counted thirteen townhouse sales in The Estuary over the prior twelve months, at an average selling price of roughly $2,005,000 and a typical 100 days on market. A second snapshot, current as of July 2026, counted three sales over its trailing twelve months, at an average selling price of roughly $2,030,000 and 143 days on market.

Same community. Same rough average price. Wildly different transaction counts and wildly different market speed, six months apart.

That is not a data error. It is what happens when you compute an "average" from a pool this small. The Estuary has 104 homes. A year in which thirteen of them trade is a turnover rate above 12 percent. A year in which three trade is a turnover rate closer to 3 percent. Both are true statements about the same community, just measured from different calendar windows. When your total sample size is in the single digits or low teens, one unusually large or small closing can swing the reported average by tens of thousands of dollars, and the next quarter's snapshot can look nothing like the last one.

This is the part that gets lost when a listing page shows you a single "average sale price" for a neighborhood. The number is real. It is just far more fragile than it looks, because it is built on a handful of closings, not a statistically stable market.

Five Closings, Two Very Different Stories

Here is what actually sold in The Estuary between October 2025 and August 2026, pulled from public closed-sale records:

Look at the two 2,884-square-foot units first. Same footprint, four days apart on the calendar, and a $340,000 gap in sale price. Now look at the two 3,646-square-foot units. Same footprint, less than a month apart, and a $400,000 gap.

Size explains part of the spread across the community, the 4,116-square-foot unit at $2.75 million is clearly a different product than the 2,884-square-foot units in the $1.5 to $1.8 million range. But size does not explain the gap within the same floor plan. Two identical footprints sold roughly a third of a million dollars apart, twice, in the same ten-month window.

That residual gap is coming from somewhere else. The Estuary's several named floor plans, marketed under names like Cortez, Drake, Magellan, and Vespucci, span roughly 1,800 square feet of air-conditioned living space up through the larger models exceeding 4,000 square feet once you count garages and covered patios. Within any one of those models, what moves the remaining price is whether the unit fronts the open Intracoastal or looks out on one of the community's interior lakes, whether it backs to the nature preserve, the condition of the kitchen and baths, and how recently the unit was updated. None of that shows up in a headline average. All of it shows up in the closing price.

What "Average" Doesn't Tell an Appraiser Either

The thin comp pool matters for more than curiosity. If you are financing a purchase in The Estuary, your lender's appraiser is pulling from the same small stack of recent closings you just saw in that table. When a community produces three to thirteen comparable sales a year, and those sales span a $1.25 million range on similar square footage, an appraiser has real work to do reconciling which comps actually apply to your unit. A waterfront-facing Vespucci and a preserve-facing unit of the same size are not interchangeable comps, even though a portal's neighborhood average would treat them as the same data point.

The community's list-to-sell ratio, reported between 93 and 95 percent across the two snapshots, tells you sellers here are pricing with real discipline rather than testing the market with reach numbers. But a 93 to 95 percent ratio on a small sample still leaves room for individual deals to land well outside that band, which is exactly what the five closings above show.

What This Means If You're Comparing The Estuary to Somewhere Else

If you are cross-shopping The Estuary against another Delray Beach waterfront community, the average price per square foot, reported at $534 across both snapshots, is a reasonable starting point for a back-of-envelope comparison. Treat it as exactly that and nothing more.

Before you get further along, ask three things about any specific unit:

1. Which named floor plan is it, and what is the actual air-conditioned square footage versus total footprint including garage and patio.
2. Does it front the Intracoastal directly, one of the two interior lakes, or the nature preserve, since that view corridor is doing real work in the closing price even within the same model.
3. When was it last updated, since a dated kitchen or bath package on an otherwise premium floor plan is likely part of why two identical-footprint units can close $300,000 to $400,000 apart.

The city itself describes the George Bush Boulevard bridge as "a vital connection across the Intracoastal Waterway in Delray Beach." That is true for boats and for daily commuting, and it is a fair description of what this whole exercise is really about. The Estuary's price tag is not one number. It is several products, several water orientations, and a market thin enough that any single average is really just describing whichever handful of homes happened to close that year. Knowing that before you make an offer, or before you list, is worth more than the average itself.

Talk to Someone Who Tracks the Actual Closings

If you are weighing a purchase or a listing in The Estuary, or comparing it against another Delray Beach waterfront address, the headline average will not tell you what your specific unit is worth. The closed comps, model by model and view by view, will. Cheran Marek tracks those closings as they happen across downtown Delray Beach and its waterfront communities. Request a personalized home valuation to see what your floor plan and frontage are actually worth in today's market, not the community-wide average.