"The Austin market" is a phrase that does almost no work. The metro median describes a city where a typical home in one area is worth four times a typical home in another, and where sellers in one ZIP are asking within a percent of modeled value while sellers a few miles away are asking nearly thirty percent above it.
So here is the whole set. Eleven areas, each measured twice — once by a model of every home standing, once by the median asking price of the homes actually listed — with the distance between the two shown for each.
Zillow Research and Realtor.com, per ZIP, refreshed weekly. The two measure different populations — every home standing against only those listed for sale — so part of each gap is seller pricing and part is that the homes on the market are not a representative sample of the area.
What the spread is telling you
A small gap means the homes currently for sale are priced close to what the area's housing stock is modeled at. A large one means they are not — and there are two quite different reasons for that, which the number alone cannot separate.
- Seller pricing. Asking prices are a record of hope, and in some areas that hope runs further ahead of the market than in others.
- Sample mix. Where the gap is widest, it is often because the homes listed are not typical of the homes standing. A luxury submarket where the expensive homes turn over faster will show a large gap without any individual seller being optimistic.
- Both, usually. Which is why the number is a prompt to look closer rather than a conclusion.
A metro median is an average of things that are not average. Eleven numbers are harder to quote and considerably more useful.
How to use this if you are buying
Read the gap for the area you are shopping, then ignore it for the specific house. A wide area gap does not mean the home in front of you is overpriced, and a narrow one does not mean it is fairly priced. What it tells you is how much room there usually is in a conversation here — which is worth knowing before you write, not after.
How to use this if you are selling
If your area shows a wide gap, the listings you are being compared against are asking well above what the stock is modeled at. Pricing to them means pricing to the group that is still sitting. The metro-wide list-to-sold figure is the sharper version of the same warning:
Sellers across the metro are asking a median of $450,000. Homes are closing at $430,771.
Realtor.com, 2026-08 · Redfin Data Center, 2026-05-31. Two independent publishers, two different months — which is why the gap is stated rather than presented as a single figure.
Every figure here is published by Zillow Research or the Realtor.com Real Estate Data Library, refreshed weekly by an automated job that refuses to publish anything failing a sanity check. None is an appraisal, and none is Unlock MLS data. Area figures are averaged across the ZIP codes listed on each neighborhood page and are not a median for the neighborhood itself.
