If you have spent any time this summer comparing Highland Park and University Park home prices online, you have probably run into something strange. The two towns do not just show different numbers. Highland Park's own numbers do not agree with each other.
Pull up Redfin and you will see Highland Park's median sale price sitting at $2.3 million for the three months ending in May 2026, down 32 percent from the same stretch a year earlier. Check Zillow the same week and the average home value reads $2.8 million, up almost 4 percent over the past year. Look at Movoto and June 2026 shows a median sale price of $4.1 million. Check HAR.com and the average asking price on active listings in July 2026 runs close to $6 million, near $1,000 a square foot. Same town. Same season. Four different stories about which direction the market is moving.
This is not a data error, and it is not evidence that Highland Park crashed a third of its value in twelve months. It is a lesson in what happens when a very small number of very expensive homes changes hands in a market that everyone insists on measuring with the tools built for much bigger ones.
Same Town, Same Season, Four Different Answers
Here is what the numbers actually looked like heading into the back half of 2026.
Source | What it measures | Highland Park figure | Time window |
|---|---|---|---|
Redfin | Median sale price, trailing 3 months | $2.3 million, down 32% year over year | Through May 2026 |
Zillow | Average home value (all homes) | $2.8 million, up 3.9% year over year | As of June 2026 |
Movoto | Median sale price, single month | $4.1 million | June 2026 |
HAR.com | Average price, active listings | $5.8 to $6.0 million (~$1,000/sq ft) | July 2026 |
Some of that spread comes from methodology. Zillow's home value estimate tries to price every home in town, not just the ones that sold. HAR.com's average is pulling from what sellers are asking right now, not what buyers actually paid. Redfin and Movoto are both reporting closed sales, and they still land almost $2 million apart on the same year.
There is also a quieter problem hiding underneath the methodology differences. Some regional data providers report "Highland Park" or "University Park" as a broad MLS-defined area that blends the incorporated town with surrounding pockets of Dallas, not the actual 2.26-square-mile town limits. A buyer comparing two headline numbers may not even be comparing the same footprint of land, let alone the same set of homes.
The Real Problem Is the Sample Size, Not the Market
Highland Park sells a genuinely small number of homes in any given month. Redfin logged 27 closings in May 2026. Movoto counted 50 in June. Either way, you are looking at a market where a handful of transactions determine the headline number, and one unusually expensive or unusually modest sale can move that number more than an entire year of gradual appreciation would.
Consider what a single Volk Estates transaction can do to a small sample. Earlier this year, The Real Deal reported that a spec mansion at 6901 Hunters Glen Road, a 10,200-square-foot, seven-bedroom home built in 2023 by Dallas-based developer Venus Homes and designed by SHM Architects, sold on a 0.8-acre corner lot after originally listing for $26 million. The buyer was Robert Vaughn, co-founder of Vaughn Capital Partners, and the closing price was not disclosed. It was not the first time that stretch of Volk Estates produced a headline-grabbing number. In 2021, a mansion at 6601 Hunters Glen sold for $21.5 million, at the time one of the largest home sales in Dallas in at least a decade.
Now imagine either of those closings landing in the same month as two dozen more ordinary Highland Park sales. A single nine-figure-adjacent transaction, or its absence, can swing a monthly median by hundreds of thousands of dollars without a single other home in town changing in value. That is not appreciation or depreciation. That is arithmetic doing what arithmetic does with a small denominator.
University Park's Numbers Behave Differently, Until You Hit Volk Estates
University Park tells a steadier story, at least on the surface. Redfin puts the average sale price at $2.95 million as of its most recent month, flat year over year, with a three-month median of $2.5 million, up 4.5 percent. HAR.com shows an August 2026 average price of $3.17 million at $717 a square foot. Those numbers do not perfectly match either, but they sit within striking distance of each other in a way Highland Park's do not.
Part of the reason is volume. University Park moved 50 homes in a single month per Redfin's data, nearly double Highland Park's count in the same window, which smooths out the effect of any one outlier sale.
The exception is Volk Estates, the enclave in the northern part of University Park where lots run one to two acres and Turtle Creek cuts through the neighborhood's private gardens and lawns. Volk Estates behaves like a miniature version of Highland Park's Beverly Drive corridor sitting inside University Park's city limits. When a Volk Estates estate trades, it can distort University Park's own numbers the same way a Beverly Drive sale distorts Highland Park's. The difference is that Volk Estates makes up a small slice of University Park's overall inventory, while Highland Park's estate-scale sales carry more weight against a smaller total pool of closings.
The Line That Actually Matters Isn't Mockingbird Lane
Here is the part that usually surprises buyers who are new to the Park Cities. Highland Park and University Park share the same school district. Highland Park Independent School District serves both towns, and Highland Park High School itself sits on Emerson Avenue, inside University Park's city limits, not Highland Park's. For most Texas home shoppers, school district is the first filter they apply. In the Park Cities, it filters out nothing, because both towns clear it identically.
That removes the usual tiebreaker and leaves three things that actually separate the towns:
- Lot size and era. Highland Park's residential lots typically run from a quarter acre to three-quarters of an acre, with the largest parcels concentrated near Armstrong Parkway and Beverly Drive, much of it built between the 1920s and 1940s. University Park's blocks run denser and more uniform outside Volk Estates, which is the outlier offering the same one-to-two-acre scale as Highland Park's grandest addresses.
- Which retail district you walk to. Highland Park Village anchors the south end of Highland Park with its shops and restaurants. University Park residents are closer to Snider Plaza and Southern Methodist University, a different daily rhythm even though both are a few minutes' drive from either town's opposite end.
- Which sub-neighborhood you land in. Old Highland Park, on the east side of Preston Road, still holds a concentration of original 1920s and 1930s homes. West Highland Park, across the Dallas North Tollway, leans mid-century. In University Park, St. Andrews Place sits along the Dallas Country Club golf course, while Windsor Place mixes original two-story homes with newer construction. The enclave name tells you more about what you are buying than the town name does.
What This Means If You're Comparing the Two Towns Right Now
If you are weighing Highland Park against University Park this year, the headline median on any single site is close to useless on its own. A more useful approach is to ask for the actual list of closed sales in your target enclave for the past few months, not the town-wide average, and look at what each of those homes actually was: lot size, year built, renovation status. Two or three outlier sales can tell you more about the noise in a monthly median than a year of aggregated statistics can.
It also helps to decide first whether you are shopping for a Highland Park kind of lot or a University Park kind of walk, since the school district will not make that decision for you. Once you know which trade-off matters more, the enclave-level comparisons (Beverly Drive versus Volk Estates, Old Highland Park versus St. Andrews Place) become far more informative than any town-wide figure.
A Few Questions We Hear Often
Are Highland Park and University Park really in the same school district? Yes. Both towns are served entirely by Highland Park Independent School District, and Highland Park High School's campus is physically located in University Park.
Why did Highland Park's median price show a 32 percent drop this year if values are not actually falling? Highland Park closes a small number of homes each month, so the mix of what happened to sell, rather than a genuine shift in value, can swing the reported median sharply in either direction. Zillow's broader home-value estimate for the same period showed values up nearly 4 percent, which is a useful reminder that no single number tells the full story in a market this thin.
Is Volk Estates part of Highland Park? No. Volk Estates is inside University Park, in the city's northern section near Turtle Creek, though its lot sizes and price points rival Highland Park's largest addresses.
Comparing two towns this closely tied together takes more than a screenshot of a median price. If you are trying to figure out which side of this line makes sense for your family, or how a specific enclave's sales history should shape your offer, The Ryan Group has spent years tracking these blocks street by street. Schedule a free consultation and we will walk through the actual comps behind the headline numbers with you.
