Every seller I sit down with has already looked it up. Zillow said one thing. A neighbor who sold last spring said another. Somewhere in between is the figure you have quietly decided your house is worth, and you are not wrong to have one. I do the same thing with my own house.
Then an agent walks through and tells you it is worth more than any of those numbers. That agent gets the listing. Six weeks later you are having the price conversation anyway — except now you are having it from behind, with a listing that has gone stale and a pool of buyers who already came through, already passed, and are not coming back to look again because you dropped twenty thousand dollars.
This is not the market to be in the “oh, I feel my home is worth.”
I said that on the podcast this summer and I meant it plainly. Feeling is not a pricing method. But neither is the number you pulled off a website, and that is the part most people never hear, so let me show you why with actual figures from an actual Dallas neighborhood.
01
A median is not a price
75238 — a large piece of Lake Highlands — closed twenty-six sales in July. Twenty-six. In a neighborhood where an original sixteen-hundred-square-foot ranch and a rebuilt house twice that size sit on the same block, twenty-six sales is not a market reading. It is a sample, and a small one. Watch what it does across a single summer.
Median sale price, 75238, 2026. NTREIS figures as presented on Episode 355 of the podcast.1
Eighty thousand dollars of swing in sixty days, and the neighborhood did not change at all. Nobody moved a school, nobody rerouted 635. What changed was which houses happened to close. Price off the May number and you spend the rest of the summer chasing the market down. Price off the June number and you hand someone a discount for showing up on the right Tuesday.
This is the quiet problem with every automated valuation and every cocktail-party comp. They are built on averages, and your house is not an average. It is a specific house on a specific street with a specific roof.
02
The number worth watching instead
In that same July, the list-to-price ratio in 75238 was 98.3 percent, and it was essentially unchanged from a year earlier.1 Nobody quotes that figure at a listing appointment, because it flatters no one. Here is what it says: a correctly priced house in that ZIP got just about all of its asking price. Not a bidding war. Not a haircut. About all of it.
Which tells you exactly what this market rewards. It is paying fairly for houses that are asked about fairly. It is not paying to correct an ambitious list price, and it is not punishing sellers who are honest about what they have. That is a market you can plan in — if you price into it rather than over it.
03
So what do we actually do
We start with the houses a buyer will genuinely compare yours to. Not the ZIP code — the street, the era, the floor plan, the condition. Then we adjust for everything a spreadsheet cannot see, because that is where the real money hides: the kitchen you redid in 2019, the foundation you had leveled and have the paperwork for, the fact that your back fence is a school parking lot. A model does not know any of that. We do, because we walked it.
Then we look at what is active right now. Your competition is not what sold in May. It is what a buyer can physically walk through this Saturday, and if there are three of those within two blocks of you, your number has to answer for it.
And then I give you a number. One number, with the reasoning attached, and a range only where the market honestly gives us one. Not a range wide enough to drive a truck through so that I can be right no matter what happens. If I think you are going to be disappointed, I would rather you be disappointed in my office in September than on the market in November.
That paperwork matters to the appraiser too. Starting with appraisals submitted on or after November 2, 2026, the new appraisal report records when each kitchen and bath was updated, measures square footage to a national standard, and keeps a sale’s condition rating attached when it is used as a comparable. More in what the new appraisal report means for sellers.
04
Price is the marketing
We do the work on the back end — the photography, the drone, the floor plans, the broker tours, the podcast, a newsletter that has been going out for more than thirty years. All of it buys attention, and attention matters enormously.
None of it buys a buyer who thinks your house is overpriced.
A new listing gets exactly one moment of undivided attention: every buyer with a saved search in your price band gets the alert on the same morning, and their agents start calling that afternoon. That moment does not come back. Spend it on a number you picked to feel good about, and the marketing you paid for is introducing your house to people who are already deciding it is too expensive.
05
What this means for you
Use market data to understand which way the wind is blowing. Use a real pricing conversation to understand what your own house is worth. Those are two different questions, and the second one has never once been answered by a spreadsheet.
If you want to see how we read the numbers before we ever get to your kitchen table, the Market Watch page walks through a month of Dallas figures and what is actually underneath them.
Everything we have written for sellers is on one page: Selling a home in Dallas →