Large Lots in Upper Mission: What Half an Acre Costs
Braden Koop Personal Real Estate Corporation · Koop Homes Group · REALTOR® · RE/MAX Kelowna
Half an acre or more in Upper Mission carried a median sale price of $1,877,500 in 2025, against $1,235,000 for the neighbourhood’s detached homes generally. That is a 52% premium for land — and across the last four years it has ranged from 18% to 52%, which tells you something important about how unreliable a single year’s figure is here.
Large lots are the scarcest thing in this part of Kelowna. Only 141 half-acre-plus detached sales were recorded in Upper Mission across five and a half years — entire months with none at all.
The land premium, year by year
| Year | Half acre and up | All Upper Mission detached | Premium | Months with sales |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | $1,996,500 | $1,374,750 | +45% | 7 of 12 |
| 2023 | $1,684,250 | $1,282,250 | +31% | 6 of 12 |
| 2024 | $1,560,000 | $1,317,500 | +18% | 9 of 12 |
| 2025 | $1,877,500 | $1,235,000 | +52% | 7 of 12 |
| 2026 (Jan–Jun) | $2,325,000 | $1,426,250 | +63% | 3 of 6 |
Read the last column before the third. In most years fewer than half the months recorded a single half-acre sale. The 2026 figure rests on three months and is greyed out for that reason — do not treat +63% as this year’s land premium. Even the full-year numbers swing between 18% and 52% on samples this small, which is a range wide enough that the honest summary is “land carries a substantial premium, roughly a third to a half” rather than any single percentage.
Why the swing is so wide
Because “half an acre and up” is not one product. It includes a 1980s house on a large flat lot near the bottom of the hill and a recently built home on two acres with a view — and in a year when two of the latter happen to close, the median jumps. The 2025 series contains a $5,288,000 sale and a $1,159,500 one.
This is the same reason I would treat any “price per acre” claim in Upper Mission with suspicion. The land is not the only thing that varies, and with seven sales a year there is no way to hold everything else constant.
What you are actually buying with the extra land
Privacy and separation, mostly. On a standard Upper Mission lot your neighbour’s window has a view of your kitchen. At half an acre and up, that stops being true, and for a lot of buyers that is the entire reason for the premium.
Room for what comes later — a shop, a pool, a carriage house if zoning permits. Worth confirming with the City before you assume it; lot size does not by itself grant permission.
And a genuine cost. A half-acre of Okanagan hillside is irrigation, and it is maintenance, and on the steeper lots it is retaining walls that eventually need attention. The land premium buys you the land; keeping it costs money every year after that.
Where to look
Large lots in this part of Kelowna cluster in the older, lower sections of Upper Mission and in Crawford Estates, which has the biggest lots of these neighbourhoods and correspondingly the highest median — about $1.67M in 2026 on roughly 21 sales a year. If land is your priority, those two are the search, and both require patience.
One local factor worth building into the diligence on any large hillside lot: much of this ground sits at the wildfire interface. Confirm insurance is available and quoted before you remove subjects, not after, and ask what FireSmart work the property has had.
The short version
Half-acre-plus properties in Upper Mission trade at a substantial premium — somewhere around a third to a half above the general detached median, depending on the year and on which handful of houses happened to sell.
With roughly seven such sales a year, this is a wait-for-the-right-one purchase, and the valuation will come down to the specific lot rather than any neighbourhood statistic. Budget for the upkeep, and sort the insurance question out early.
The numbers behind this
Interior REALTORS® Matrix, Residential, Single Family – Detached, Central Okanagan, Upper Mission sub-area, lot size 0.5 acres and above, January 2022 – June 2026, compared against all detached sales in the same sub-area and period. Pulled 29 July 2026. Aggregate market statistics only, on a small sample.
Current inventory is on Upper Mission homes for sale and Crawford Estates, with the full search on browse properties.
Looking for land specifically?
Lot size is not something you can filter for reliably on the public portals, and roughly seven of these trade a year. Tell me what you need — acreage, slope, shop space — and I will watch for it properly.
