Midlothian & Ellis County Market Report: August 2026

Mary Eubanks, MBA, REALTOR® · RE/MAX Frontier · Published September 25, 2026

Something changed in August, and it didn't change here. Statewide, Texas started to firm up. Midlothian didn't come along for it.

• Texas stabilized in August. Price cuts fell, sale-to-list rose, and more homes sold above asking than a year ago.
• Midlothian's price cuts are running more than three times the statewide rate. That gap is the story this month.
• If you're selling here, the recovery you're reading about in the headlines hasn't reached your street yet.

Texas found a floor in August

Read those last three rows together. More homes selling above asking, sellers keeping a larger share of their list price, and price cuts no longer climbing. That's a market that has stopped falling.

Prices are still down 1.3% year over year and sales volume is still soft, so nobody should call this a rebound. But after eighteen months of every indicator pointing the same direction, August is the first month where several of them stopped.

Midlothian did not participate

More than three times the statewide rate. That is not a rounding difference or a seasonal quirk. It's a structurally different market operating inside the same state.

Compare the two columns that matter. Statewide, 12.3% of homes sold above asking and sellers held 97.3% of list. In Midlothian, 9.5% sold above asking and sellers held 95.05%. On a $478,000 home, that two-point difference is about $10,000 out of a seller's pocket compared to the Texas average.

One honest caveat on the median. Sixty-three closings is a small sample, and a 5.3% decline partly reflects mix rather than value. When fewer high-end homes close, the median drops even if no individual house lost a dollar. Zillow's home value index for Midlothian, which measures differently, has the market close to flat year over year at roughly $454,000. The truth is somewhere between those two readings, and neither one tells you what your specific house is worth.

Your house did not lose 5% of its value this year. But the asking prices in your neighborhood are still 5% too high, and that is a different problem with the same cure.

Ellis County at a glance

Red Oak continues to be the county's outlier, and it's the one I'd watch. Homes there clear three weeks faster than Midlothian at a median roughly $58,000 lower. HAR's data for the 75154 ZIP put the August average sale price at $515,981 and $188 per square foot, which runs well above the city-limits median because the ZIP reaches into unincorporated acreage with very different housing stock. If you see a Red Oak number that looks too high, that's usually why.

Waxahachie sits between the two on price and closer to Midlothian on speed. It has the widest range of anywhere in the county, from historic downtown homes to new master-planned sections out along 287 and I-35E, which makes a countywide median almost meaningless there.

Why Midlothian is lagging the state

Two reasons, and they compound.

We're an outer suburb, and outer suburbs corrected last

Dallas-Fort Worth built aggressively through the pandemic boom, and the outer growth corridors absorbed most of it. The close-in neighborhoods corrected earlier and have stabilized. The communities on the metro edge, Midlothian very much included, are still working that supply through. When you read that Texas is recovering, that's largely the core of the metros. We're behind it on the same curve, not on a different one.

Your competition is a builder, not your neighbor

The gap between new construction and resale pricing has collapsed to an all-time low statewide, around $15,000. Before the pandemic, new construction routinely carried a premium near $100,000. Builders closed that gap by shifting to smaller floor plans and by putting everything they have into the monthly payment: rate buydowns, closing cost credits, incentive packages that run well into five figures around here.

So when a listing sits ninety days, it usually isn't overpriced against other resale homes. It's that a buyer can walk into a model three miles away and get a payment that listing can't match, on a house nobody has lived in. That is why 76% of Midlothian sellers end up cutting, and it's why pricing a little above where you want to land is actively harmful in this specific market.

If you're selling

Don't read the national headlines as permission to hold firm. Texas firmed up in August. Midlothian didn't. The gap between those two facts is where sellers lose money this fall.

Your first price is the only one that matters. Three quarters of the listings around you have already cut. Price into the last sixty days of closed sales, not above them, and you skip the ninety-day education the rest of the market is paying for.

Know what the builders near you are offering this week. If a community down the road is 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.

Presentation is not the place to save money. With 518 active listings in Midlothian, you're being filtered out on a phone screen before anyone drives by.

If you're buying

Your window is narrower than it was. Statewide, the share of homes selling above asking is rising and sale-to-list is climbing. That's the leading edge of conditions tightening. Midlothian still has real negotiating room, but buyer-favorable markets close faster than they open.

You still have leverage here. Sale-to-list at 95%, three quarters of sellers cutting, and homes sitting longer than the state average. If you've been hearing bidding war stories, that isn't this market.

Compare the total cost, not the sticker. A builder buying down your rate can beat a price cut on a resale home over the life of the loan. Read what you're trading, though. Those incentives usually carry conditions about using their lender or title company.

Don't skip the inspection. Some buyers still waive out of habit from the frenzy years. There is no reason for it now. You have the time and the position.

What I'm watching next month

Whether Midlothian's price-cut rate starts following the state down. August was the first month in a while where the statewide indicators moved together in a positive direction. If that holds through September and October and Midlothian still doesn't follow, it tells us the builder incentive dynamic is the dominant force here and not just a temporary drag.

I'll have those numbers in next month's report.

Sources: Redfin for Texas statewide August 2026 figures and Waxahachie days on market, based on MLS and public records. Orchard MLS market data for Midlothian and Red Oak, trailing 30 days. PropertyFocus for Waxahachie median, September 2026. HAR.com for 75154 ZIP averages, August 2026. Zillow Home Value Index for the Midlothian comparison figure. Texas Real Estate Research Center at Texas A&M University for new construction and resale price gap.

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.