You've priced yourself out of Newport Beach before you even started looking. Everyone has — the median here just cleared $3.8 million, and Eastside Costa Mesa, the neighborhood you've been eyeing instead, isn't exactly a bargain anymore either, sitting north of $2.2 million. So you settled. You told yourself the zip code doesn't matter, that a good school district is a good school district no matter which side of the line it falls on.

Here's the thing: it doesn't have to be a compromise.

12 Shellprint Court sits inside One Nautical Mile, a gated enclave of just 42 Mediterranean-style townhomes tucked into Newport Heights — the kind of quiet, walkway-lined community you'd expect to cost what your Eastside search results are costing you. Instead, it's listed at $1,350,000.

Four bedrooms. Cathedral ceilings. Granite counters. A primary suite with dual vanities and a soaking tub that feels earned after a day at the beach five minutes away. And the address on the mailbox reads Newport Beach, CA 92663 — not "Newport-adjacent," not "steps from Newport," the real thing.

The ground floor gives you something most townhomes this size don't: a private bedroom with direct garage access, separate from the main living level. Call it a guest suite. Call it a home office. Call it the space your in-laws stay in twice a year instead of your guest room. It's yours to define, and it's exactly the kind of flexible square footage that a growing household — or a family building toward one — actually uses.

Upstairs, the main level opens up with soaring ceilings, a gas fireplace, and light pouring through custom-blinded windows onto the kind of granite counters that make the kitchen feel like it belongs in a home twice the price. One floor up from that, two more bedrooms and a primary suite round things out, private and quiet, above the noise of the day.

And if you're weighing schools — because of course you are — Newport Heights Elementary carries an A rating, and this address falls inside Newport-Mesa Unified, the same district drawing families to Eastside Costa Mesa in the first place. You're not trading anything to get here. You're finally arriving somewhere you were starting to think did not exist anymore.

The seller has priced this to move — three reductions since June, down from $1,475,000 to $1,350,000 — which tells you two things plainly: they're motivated, and the window on this price is not going to stay open indefinitely in a market where coastal Newport rarely dips this low. This isn't a compromise property. It's the version of Newport Beach that actually fits inside the budget you brought to Costa Mesa.

Come see what "Newport Beach" was supposed to feel like all along.

— The Coastal Realtor