Tribeza's $1 Million Houses, Three Years Later

In September 2023, Tribeza ran a roundup of what a million dollars bought in Austin: What $1 Million Buys You Now in Austin Real Estate, by Ellen Daly. Six properties, one per part of town. One of them was my listing.

That was newsroom editorial, not a promoted placement. I'm at Compass now.

Here's what makes it useful three years later: it froze a price point in time. Six real houses, all within $50,000 of a million dollars, dated September 2023. That's a benchmark you can actually measure against.

The six

Mine was the 1940s Tudor on East 32nd. Leaded glass, steeply pitched roof, 1,445 square feet, one bathroom. The cheapest thing on the list.

The number that looks like nothing happened

Austin metro, single-family, same source and same basis at both ends:

Three years. The median moved $994. Down, not up, and by less than the cost of a decent inspection.

If you only read that row you'd conclude Austin did nothing since 2023. That conclusion is wrong in both directions, and the six houses above are how you see why.

Where those ZIP codes actually went

Trailing twelve months ending July 2026, Unlock MLS:

I'm comparing levels here, not year-over-year changes, and that's deliberate. A single July-to-July move on series this size tells you which months were busy more than it tells you where the market went. The levels are the sturdy part.

And the levels are stark. The median house in 78704 costs 2.5 times the median house in 78745. Those two ZIP codes are five miles apart and people call both of them South Austin. Average them together with everything else and you get a metro median that moved $994.

The flat number isn't wrong. It's just a composition average across places that have almost nothing to do with each other, which is the least useful thing a number can be. I broke the central-Austin version of this apart ZIP by ZIP in What "Central Austin" Actually Means.

Look at 78704 specifically. In 2023, $999,500 bought a two-bedroom on Alta Vista in Travis Heights. The 78704 single-family median is now $1,192,500. A million dollars was an above-median price in that ZIP then. Today it's below median. Nobody had to do anything for that to happen. That decoupling is the same one I wrote about in what I told CultureMap about South Austin, from the other direction.

Now 78745, five miles south. The Philco Drive house was $999,000, roughly double what the median house in that ZIP goes for today. It was a 2016 build with a heated pool on a cul-de-sac, so it should have carried a premium. But a $1M budget in 78745 in 2023 was shopping the top of the market, and in 78704 it was shopping the middle. Two different games, five miles apart, same money.

Three I can't tell you about honestly

• 78705, my own listing. The series I publish for that ZIP is condominiums, and 808 E 32nd was a single-family house. Different market. Quoting a condo median at you about a Tudor would be a made-up number.
• 78722, Cherrywood. My figure there is neighborhood commentary from the 2025 relocation guide, around a $700,000 median on a $475K to $1.2M range, not a monthly MLS series. Not comparable to the rows above.
• 78730, off RR 2222. Outside my published set entirely.

I'd rather show you three clean comparisons and name the three I can't make than fill the table and hope you don't check.

What actually changed for a buyer

Not the price. The payment.

A $1,000,000 purchase with 20% down is an $800,000 loan.

That's $405 a month, or about $4,900 a year. Run it the other direction and it's starker: the $5,430 payment that bought a $1,000,000 house in September 2023 supports roughly $1,080,000 today. Same money out of your account every month, about $81,000 more house.

Square footage moved the same way. At the metro median price per square foot, a million dollars covered about 4,444 square feet in 2023 and about 4,676 now.

So the sticker price stood still while the thing that determines whether you can actually afford it got about 8% cheaper. That is not the story the median tells.

What to do about it

Stop pricing your search on the metro median. It's a composition average across ZIP codes whose medians differ by a factor of 2.5. It tells you nothing about the three neighborhoods you're actually choosing between. The ten-year market page has every month since October 2015 if you want to check my work.

Price in the payment, not the sticker. A buyer who waited from 2023 for prices to fall got a $994 discount. A buyer who watched rates got $81,000 of purchasing power. Those are not the same decision and only one of them was visible in the headlines.

Pick the ZIP before the budget. A million dollars is a top-of-market number in one part of South Austin and a below-median number in another. Which one you're in determines whether you're competing against three offers or none. Start with the neighborhood guides and the South Austin guide in particular.

Tribeza's premise still holds, incidentally. A million dollars in Austin does buy square footage, a central location, and some charm. It just buys a very different one of those depending on which five miles you pick.

Source: Unlock MLS (ACTRIS) for the ZIP-level trailing 12-month figures ending July 2026. Metro figures are Redfin, single-family, Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos, for the months shown. Payment figures are principal and interest only, 30-year fixed, 20% down, and exclude taxes, insurance and HOA, which in Travis County are not a rounding error. Listing prices are as Tribeza published them in September 2023. Nothing here is a valuation of any of those six specific properties, which I have not tracked since.