Spend a summer refreshing your search for Highland Park listings and you will notice something odd. Some weeks bring nothing new at all. The town's entire pool of active listings typically sits in the range of two or three dozen homes, a number small enough that a single well-connected buyer's agent could plausibly know the story behind every one of them. Yet closings keep happening. Homes you never saw listed turn up months later as recorded sales. The buyer who eventually wins one of Highland Park's best addresses is often working from a different list than the one you found on a portal.
That gap is not an accident of a slow market. It is a structural feature of how Highland Park's luxury tier actually transacts, and understanding it changes how you should read every price you see quoted for this town.
The Numbers Highland Park Shows You, And The Ones It Doesn't
As of August 2026, the average home price in Highland Park sits at roughly $4.72 million, with buyers paying close to $936 per square foot, according to MLS-sourced data for the town. Active listings in July 2026 carried a median asking price near $4.89 million. But the trailing three month median sale price ran closer to $2.3 million as of that same July reading, a figure down from the same period a year earlier.
That is not a typo and it is not a market in freefall. It is two different populations of homes. The homes asking $4.89 million and the homes actually closing around $2.3 million are not the same properties measured at different points in a negotiation. They are often different tiers of the market entirely, and the gap between them is exactly where an off-market economy has room to operate. Homes selling in the same window did move faster than a year earlier, with an average of 38 days on market compared to 54 the prior year, and closed sale counts ticked up as well. The market has some real momentum. It just isn't fully visible from a public search.
What A Study Of 700,000 North Texas Sales Found
A researcher at the University of Georgia, Darren Hayunga, tested a question that most agents answer from instinct rather than data: does keeping a home off the MLS actually help or hurt the price a seller gets? His analysis covered more than 700,000 home sales across North Texas using regional MLS records spanning two decades, and the findings complicate the conventional wisdom that maximum exposure always means maximum price.
Before the National Association of Realtors adopted its Clear Cooperation Policy in May 2020, a rule requiring any publicly marketed listing to appear on the MLS within one business day, homes sold as pocket listings carried a premium of roughly 3.3 percent over comparable homes marketed traditionally. After the policy took effect, that premium collapsed by about 73 percent, landing around 0.9 percent, a level too small to call statistically meaningful. On paper, the policy did exactly what it set out to do for the typical home.
Luxury properties told a different story. Homes at the top of the market that sold as pocket listings carried a premium of around 8.2 percent, a figure the study's authors describe as evidence that withholding a high value asset from the open market functions as a deliberate signal of exclusivity rather than a pricing accident. HousingWire's coverage of the research notes that pocket listing activity did not decline after Clear Cooperation took hold. If anything it ticked slightly higher, as agents and brokerages found other ways to market privately within the rule's boundaries.
That distinction matters enormously for a town where the average sale price is measured in seven figures. The rule that erased the pocket listing advantage for a typical starter home in North Texas appears to have done little to touch the advantage at Highland Park's price point.
Why Sellers At This Level Choose Privacy Over Exposure
The reasoning is not mysterious once you hear it from the people negotiating these deals. Jerry Mooty Jr., CEO of Christie's International Real Estate @properties Lone Star, put it plainly to The Real Deal: "High-net worth individuals are very sensitive to privacy." A public listing invites a bidding war, media attention, and a level of scrutiny that many sellers at this tier are simply not willing to trade for a marginally higher offer.
There is also a cost to sitting on the market that cuts the other way. A Plano based Compass agent, Matt Haistings, described the math to the same publication: once a listing crosses the 30, 45, or 60 day mark, the gap between the original asking price and what it eventually sells for can swing between 5 and 10 percent. A quiet, well targeted private sale avoids that clock entirely.
Texas adds a structural incentive that most other states don't share. It is one of only twelve states that do not require parties to disclose a sale price, which means an off-market transaction can stay genuinely private, not just unlisted. Reporting from The Real Deal on Dallas's off-market ecosystem points to another motive layered on top of privacy: keeping a sale price out of public record can also help a seller manage how the county appraises the property for tax purposes going forward. In the first quarter of 2026 alone, four Dallas homes sold for more than $20 million entirely off-market, according to Chad Barrett, a member of one of the state's top producing residential teams.
Not Every Off-Market Strategy Wins The Same Way
Here is where the picture gets more honest than most marketing around private listings admits. A Bright MLS report from April 2025 studied homes marketed first as office exclusives, meaning shared quietly within a single brokerage before any public listing. The finding was blunt: those homes took longer to sell and offered no price advantage over listings that went straight to the MLS. Nearly 90 percent of them ended up on the MLS eventually anyway, which suggests the private phase functioned more as a soft launch than a genuine alternative to public marketing.
Compass tells a more favorable version of its own results. The brokerage's February 2025 data, reported by Real Estate News, showed that listings which began as a Compass Private Exclusive or Coming Soon designation sold for 2.9 percent more once they reached the MLS, compared to homes that skipped the private phase entirely. Compass is not a neutral party in this debate. It built its national growth strategy around private listings and has been the most vocal critic of Clear Cooperation. But its own numbers point in the same direction as the independent Hayunga study: the advantage shows up at the high end, not across the board.
Dallas also has more off-market infrastructure than a single brokerage's tools. A network called Masters of Residential Real Estate, founded in 2018, functions as an informal exchange where top producing agents from multiple firms trade listings before they go public. According to The Real Deal's reporting on the network, Compass agents sit at the same table as agents from several other established Dallas brokerages, suggesting the off-market habit in this city predates any single company's technology and runs deeper than a marketing gimmick.
What This Means If You're Comparing Neighborhoods
If you are weighing Highland Park against another Park Cities tier neighborhood using the numbers you can find in a standard search, you are comparing an incomplete slice of Highland Park against a more complete picture of somewhere else. A handful of considerations follow from that:
- A median or average price pulled from public listings will understate the true depth of Highland Park's top tier, since some of the most competitive properties in that tier never post publicly at all.
- Days on market figures for the town reflect only the homes that were exposed to the open market long enough to accumulate days, which skews the visible data toward a faster moving, lower priced segment than the true top of the market.
- A buyer working exclusively from portal alerts is not seeing the same inventory as a buyer whose agent has relationships inside the local off-market networks that move a meaningful share of the highest value transactions.
None of this means the public market is unimportant. Most Highland Park transactions still happen through traditional listings, and NAR's newer Multiple Listing Options for Sellers policy, introduced in March 2025, now gives sellers a formal delayed marketing path that keeps a listing compliant while limiting its public syndication for a set window. It is a sign that the industry is still negotiating where the line between privacy and transparency should sit.
What it does mean is that a price you see quoted for Highland Park deserves a second question behind it: is this the whole market, or just the part of it that happened to be visible.
If you're trying to make sense of what a Highland Park home is actually worth, including the sales that never showed up in a public search, that's the kind of read only comes from being inside the local network, not just the listing feed. Christian Smith Real Estate Group can walk you through the full picture with a personalized home valuation built on more than what's publicly listed. Request your valuation today and see the market as it actually moves.
