In late March 2026, a six-bedroom house on Saint Johns Drive listed for $24.9 million. By May 1 it had sold, the buyer arriving through a trust called Lost River, the sellers Bestow CEO Melbourne O'Banion and BeautyBio founder Jamie O'Banion. The Dallas Central Appraisal District had the property valued at $11.8 million for tax purposes, which tells you something about the gap between what a house is worth on paper and what someone will pay for the two things that made this one rare: creek frontage and a Highland Park address on the same deed. Damon Williamson of The Agency Dallas, who represented the buyers, put it plainly: "The house is backing up to a creek, which is a really rare thing for Highland Park."
That single closing, on that single day, changed whatever "the Highland Park median" said the week before and the week after. In a town where roughly 11 to 12 homes close in an average month, one sale at that scale isn't statistical noise. It's a meaningful slice of the sample. That's the real story hiding under every Highland Park price report you'll find online: the numbers contradict each other constantly, and once you understand why, the question stops being which figure is correct and becomes which figure applies to what you're actually trying to do.
Three Reports, Three Numbers
Pull up four sources on the same week and you'll get four different answers to "what's the median home price in Highland Park."
| Metric | Source and window | Figure |
|---|---|---|
| Closed-sale median | Three months through May 2026 | $2.3 million |
| Average home value, smoothed index | As of June 30, 2026 | $2.8 million |
| Median list price, active inventory | July 2026 snapshot | About $4.9 million |
| MLS closed-sale median | Late 2025 | About $3.0 million |
None of these four numbers is measuring the same thing, yet all four get repeated as if they were interchangeable. A closed-sale median tells you what actually traded hands in a narrow window. A list-price median tells you what current sellers are asking, which jumps the moment a handful of $10 million-plus estates hit the market at once, whether or not any of them sell. A smoothed value index is built specifically to filter out that kind of swing.
Price per square foot tells the same story from a different angle. Closed sales in that same three-month window through May 2026 worked out to roughly $782 per square foot, down slightly from a year earlier. Active listings that same summer were asking closer to $922 to $1,000 per square foot. Sellers and buyers are not disagreeing about Highland Park's value. They're looking at two different slices of a very small pie.
The clearest example of how far this can swing: that same Redfin window through May 2026 reported the median sale price down 32.2% year over year. Read alone, that sounds like a crash. But the smoothed Zillow index, covering a mostly overlapping stretch, showed the average home value up 3.9% year over year as of June 30, 2026. Both figures are accurate. Neither is describing a change in what Highland Park homes are worth. They're describing a change in which homes happened to close.
Why One House Moves the Whole Town
Highland Park's housing stock runs to roughly 3,400 single-family homes, and at any given time only around 25 to 30 of them are listed for sale. Closed sales average close to 11.8 a month, with a real seasonal pattern: 15 to 18 in May and June, as few as 6 to 8 in December and January. The broader Park Cities buyer pool absorbs somewhere around 12 to 14 transactions a month above the $2.5 million mark, which is close to the entire monthly closing count for the town.
A market that thin does not average out the way a market with hundreds of monthly closings does. If a $16 million estate closes in June instead of July, June's median jumps and July's looks soft, even though nothing about underlying demand changed between those two months. Financing patterns reinforce how different this buyer pool is from the rest of Dallas: roughly 36% of Highland Park purchases are cash, one of the higher shares in the region, and jumbo mortgages dominate the financed transactions because the median price runs about four times the conforming loan limit. Construction loans show up in around 8% of transactions, which tracks with how common the tear-down-and-rebuild path has become on older lots.
Put those pieces together and a single closing like Saint Johns Drive isn't an outlier the data shrugs off. It's a meaningful fraction of the town's entire monthly transaction volume, arriving with financing and a buyer profile that looks nothing like a typical Dallas closing.
The Street Does the Talking the Median Can't
Any given month's town-wide median also blends streets that don't behave alike. Beverly Drive and Lakeside Drive carry the largest lots in Highland Park, generally a half acre to more than an acre, and estates there routinely trade between $5 million and $25 million and up. Armstrong Parkway carries some of the town's biggest lots and its most architecturally significant homes. Move a few blocks west of Preston Road and lots shrink, streets get denser, and pricing looks like a different market entirely, even though the tax bill still says Highland Park ISD and the same town police department.
Age compounds this. Much of Beverly Drive's housing stock dates to the 1920s and 1930s, with homes attributed to architects like Fooshee & Cheek, and Armstrong Parkway carries work attributed to Anton Korn. That pedigree does not automatically protect a house. On at least one documented Beverly Drive lot, an architecturally significant home was torn down purely to make the land easier to market, and the empty lot then sat unsold for years afterward. On streets this old, a comp is rarely a comparison of houses. It's a comparison of land, with the structure treated as either an asset or an obstacle depending on the buyer.
Which Number Actually Serves You
The right number depends entirely on which side of a closing you're standing on.
- If you're selling within the next 60 to 90 days, weight the trailing three to six month closed-sale median over any single month's list-price snapshot. An appraiser will pull roughly that same window.
- If you're trying to gauge whether Highland Park is cooling or heating, ignore any single month's percentage swing. Look at the smoothed value index instead. Sharp month-over-month moves in a market this size are almost always compositional, not directional.
- If you're comparing a specific address to "the market," pull comps from that street or the surrounding three or four blocks, not the town median. Beverly Drive and the blocks west of Preston Road are not the same product wearing the same zip code.
- If you're evaluating a teardown candidate, price the lot first. Architectural history is a bonus. It is not a floor under the sale price.
Highland Park's numbers aren't broken. They're honest about a market with roughly a dozen closings a month spread across streets with very different lot sizes, ages, and buyer pools. Read them at that resolution and the contradictions stop looking like noise and start looking like information.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did one source say Highland Park values were rising while another showed a steep drop over roughly the same months? The drop came from a raw closed-sale median over a specific three-month window, which moves with whatever mix of homes happened to close rather than with underlying value. The smoothed index is built to filter out exactly that kind of composition shift, which is why it read up 3.9% year over year as of June 30, 2026, over a mostly overlapping stretch.
How many homes actually sell in Highland Park in a given month? The trailing average sits close to 11 to 12 closed sales a month, based on late 2025 MLS data, with seasonal peaks of 15 to 18 in May and June and troughs of 6 to 8 in December and January. A sample that small means individual outlier sales carry outsized weight in any monthly figure.
Does a lower price per square foot west of Preston Road signal a problem with those homes? Not on its own. Homes in that part of town tend to sit on smaller lots than Beverly Drive or Armstrong Parkway, and town-wide per-square-foot figures blend both. A lower number in that pocket more often reflects lot size than construction quality or desirability within Highland Park.
Reading four different numbers for the same zip code takes a second opinion, not another search bar tab. The Rosen Group tracks Highland Park block by block, not just town-wide, and can walk you through which comps actually apply to your address. Request a private consultation and home valuation to see where your street really sits.
