Midlothian & Ellis County Market Report: July 2026

Mary Eubanks, MBA, REALTOR® · RE/MAX Frontier · Published August 20, 2026

Every month I pull the numbers and write up what I'm actually seeing, not what the national headlines say. Here's July, and this one has a stat in it that stopped me.

• Three out of four Midlothian listings have taken a price cut. Not three out of ten. Three out of four.
• Midlothian is softening while the broader DFW market is not. This is an outer-suburb story, not a Texas story.
• Red Oak is the outlier in the county, and it's moving in the opposite direction.

Midlothian

That last row is the whole report.

A year ago Midlothian's figure was closer to six in ten. It's climbing while the metro's is dropping. And the median sale price here is down 5.3% year over year while the DFW median is up 1.5%.

Let me be careful about what that does and doesn't mean, because "prices down 5 percent" is the kind of line that panics people. It does not mean your house is worth 5% less than it was last year. Part of that shift is mix: fewer high-end homes closed this period, and when the top of the market slows the median falls even if no individual house lost a dollar. Sixty-three closings is a small enough sample that a handful of transactions moves the number meaningfully.

What it does mean is that sellers here are consistently starting too high and correcting on the way down, and that is costing them real money.

Ellis County at a glance

Look at the days-on-market column. Midlothian is running roughly two and a half times the metro average. Red Oak clears three weeks faster than Midlothian. Waxahachie sits in between at a materially lower price point.

These are not the same market. Anyone quoting you a single "Ellis County" number is flattening three genuinely different situations into one.

What's actually happening

The statewide backdrop first. Texas is running a median sale price around $340,000, roughly flat year over year, with active inventory at about a 5.3-month supply. The typical Texas seller is cutting $12,000 off their initial asking price, about 3.4%.

Now the part that surprised me. Among the four big Texas metros, DFW has the smallest price concessions this year at around 4.1%. Austin is at 5.9%, San Antonio 5.6%, Houston 4.9%. The DFW median came in near $390,000 in April and the more recent trailing figure has it above $405,000 and rising.

So DFW is fine. Midlothian is where the softness landed.

That's not a coincidence. The metroplex built aggressively through the boom years and the outer growth corridors absorbed most of it. Midlothian, Waxahachie, and the communities on the metro edge are where the pandemic-era construction surge is still working through the system. The core of the metro corrected earlier and has stabilized. We're behind it on the same curve.

The builder problem

Here's the mechanism, and it's the single most useful thing I can tell you this month.

The gap between what a new build costs and what an existing home costs has collapsed to an all-time low. Statewide, the median new construction home is running about $341,500 against $326,200 for existing homes. A spread of roughly $15,500. Before the pandemic, new construction routinely carried a premium near $100,000, sometimes 40 to 60% above comparable resale.

Builders closed that gap by shifting toward smaller, more attainable floor plans and by throwing everything they have at the monthly payment: rate buydowns, closing cost credits, incentive packages that around here run well into five figures.

When your neighbor's house sits for ninety days, it usually isn't because it's overpriced against other resale homes. It's because a buyer can walk into a model three miles away and get a payment your listing can't match, on a house nobody has ever lived in.

That's the competition. It's why 76% of Midlothian listings are cutting price. And it's why the standard advice about pricing a little above where you want to land is actively harmful in this particular market right now.

Red Oak is doing something different

Red Oak is the one Ellis County market moving the other way. Median sale price up 6.4% year over year. Days on market down from 55 to 45. Above-asking sales up almost 8 points to 14.3%. Price cuts there are running 53.6%, high in absolute terms but well under Midlothian's 76%.

Two things are driving it.

First, price. At a $420,000 median and $171 per square foot, Red Oak is the affordable entry into South DFW, and it has the shortest Dallas commute in the county at about 20 miles. When affordability tightens, the cheaper adjacent market gains. That's exactly what the numbers show.

Second, and I think this is underappreciated locally, the jobs are arriving. Google's data center campus on 166 acres near FM 664 and Highway 342 came online late last year, a roughly $600 million investment, with a much larger Texas buildout signaled. The Qarbon Aerospace plant sits directly across Ovilla Road. Two anchors in advanced manufacturing and data infrastructure inside the city limits is a different story than "bedroom community off a highway," and I don't think it's priced in yet.

If you're selling

Your first price is the only one that matters. With three quarters of listings cutting, the market is telling you plainly what happens to sellers who test a number. The homes still sitting at day ninety are teaching you what doesn't work. Price into the last sixty days of closed sales, not above them.

Your first two weeks are your best two weeks. Listings that go live and then reduce three weeks later almost always net less than if they'd started right. You don't get those two weeks back, and there's no version of this market where you do.

Find out what the builders near you are offering. Before we set a price, I go look. If there's a community down the road covering $20,000 in closing costs, that's a real factor in your listing and it needs a strategy, not a hope that buyers won't notice.

Spend money on presentation. Staging, professional photography, video. With 518 active listings in Midlothian, you're being filtered out on a phone screen before anyone drives by. That's not the place to economize.

If you're buying

You have more leverage in Midlothian than almost anywhere in DFW. Sale-to-list is running at 95%, three quarters of sellers are cutting, homes are sitting more than twice as long as the metro average, and only about one in ten sells above asking. If you've been hearing stories about bidding wars, that isn't this market.

Don't skip the inspection. Some buyers still waive out of habit from the frenzy years. There's zero reason for it now. You have the time and you have the position. Use both.

Compare total cost, not sticker price. A builder buying down your rate can be worth more over the life of the loan than a price cut on a resale home. But read what you're trading. Those incentives usually carry conditions about using their lender or their title company, and the arithmetic changes once you account for it.

Don't buy at your ceiling just because you can. The best thing about this market is that you can buy comfortably. Stretching to the top of your range in a market that isn't appreciating quickly is how people end up stuck in a house they can't move.

Looking ahead

Forecasts for the back half of 2026 point to flat-to-modest movement rather than any dramatic swing in either direction. Statewide inventory is elevated but no longer climbing the way it was a year ago, and it recently ticked just below year-ago levels for the first time in a while.

The thing worth understanding is that buyer-favorable conditions aren't permanent, and they usually close faster than they opened. If rates ease, the buyers currently sitting on the sidelines come back, and the negotiating room in Midlothian narrows quickly.

Sources: Orchard MLS market data for Midlothian, Red Oak, and Dallas-Fort Worth, trailing 30 days as of August 19, 2026. Redfin for Waxahachie, three months ending June 2026. Texas Real Estate Research Center at Texas A&M University for statewide and metro figures.

Mary Eubanks, MBA · REALTOR® · TREC License #0640273 · RE/MAX Frontier, 803 W Main St, Midlothian, TX 76065. Each office independently owned and operated. Information is deemed reliable but not guaranteed and should be independently verified.