Plano's Median Home Price Barely Moved in 2025. The Ground Underneath It Just Did.

On a Sunday morning in early August, longtime Plano residents heard a boom loud enough to pull people onto their porches. Crews had imploded the old Electronic Data Systems campus at 5400 Legacy Drive, the sprawling 1980s office complex known locally as the "God Pod," to make room for AT&T's new $1.3 billion global headquarters. The demolition wasn't a surprise. It had been telegraphed since January, when AT&T announced the move, and it marked the start of construction on a 54-acre campus expected to bring roughly 10,000 employees to a corridor that has spent the past seven years sitting empty.

That single event tells you more about where Plano's housing market is headed than the median price does, and the median price is where most buyers and sellers start looking.

Here's the thing about that median: it barely moved in 2025, and it's tempting to read that stillness as proof of a healthy, resilient market. It's really proof of something narrower, something structural, and something that two major projects now underway are about to put under real pressure for the first time in years.

The Number That Refused to Move

Plano closed 2025 with a median home price of $540,000, up just 0.4 percent from the year before, on 2,297 total sales. Homes spent a median of 25 days on the market and sold for 98.1 percent of asking price. Through mid-July 2026, the pattern held: 1,209 homes closed at a median of $535,000, a median days-on-market of 21, and a sold-to-list ratio of 98.5 percent. Nothing dramatic in either direction.

Compare that to the cities around it. Frisco's median price dropped roughly $6,000 in 2025. McKinney fell about $35,000. Celina, still absorbing waves of new subdivisions, dropped by roughly $90,000. These aren't struggling markets. They're growth markets where builders kept releasing inventory even as buyer demand cooled, and the price cuts builders used to move that inventory dragged the entire city's median down with them.

Plano didn't have that problem, because Plano barely had that inventory. New construction accounted for fewer than 20 home sales in Plano in 2025, under 1 percent of the total market. A city with almost no new supply can't have its median dragged around by builder discounting. That's not resilience in the way people usually mean it. It's a side effect of being built out.

Why a Built-Out City Suddenly Has Room to Build

Plano's Assistant City Manager, Doug McDonald, has pointed to a handful of sites, the former EDS campus, the old JCPenney campus nearby, Collin Creek Mall, and the Assembly Park area in east Plano, as the main paths left for new development in a city with very little raw land remaining. Redevelopment of what's already there is now the only real growth lever the city has, and 2026 is the year two of those levers moved at once.

The first is AT&T. The company is consolidating three Dallas-Fort Worth offices, including its current downtown Dallas headquarters, onto the new Legacy Drive campus. Plano Economic Development Director Michael Talley described the ripple effect in plain terms: "That's 10,000 people being on campus, going to restaurants, going to happy hour and grabbing coffee." The city approved $20 million in incentives to land the project and expects the site to generate roughly $6 million a year in property tax revenue once AT&T is fully in place. This is demand-side pressure aimed squarely at the top of the market. It reinforces exactly the kind of corporate anchor that has made West Plano's Legacy District a premium address since Ross Perot first built EDS's headquarters there in the 1980s.

The second is Collin Creek. The enclosed mall that anchored Collin County shopping from 1981 until it closed in 2019 is now a $1 billion mixed-use redevelopment led by Farmers Branch-based Centurion American Development Group. As of this summer, roughly 200 homeowners are already living in the new neighborhood, with another 400 residential lots set to release to builders through the third quarter of 2026. Ashton Woods, DRB Homes, and Mattamy Homes are building attached single-family townhomes there, priced from around $470,000. This is supply-side pressure aimed at an entirely different buyer, and it's the first real wave of new-construction product Plano has seen in years.

Three Markets Wearing One Median

The citywide median has always been an average across very different products. What's changing is how far apart those products are about to sit.

A single citywide median sitting around $535,000 to $540,000 is a blend of all three tracks, and it tells a buyer almost nothing about what they'll actually pay depending on which track they're shopping. A family comparing a $600,000 resale home in an established West Plano neighborhood to a new Collin Creek townhome in the high $400,000s isn't making a pricing decision so much as a lifestyle one: an older, larger lot with a mature yard against a smaller footprint with modern finishes and lower maintenance. Meanwhile, someone shopping Legacy West condos is operating in a price tier that has almost nothing to do with the citywide median at all.

What This Means If You're Comparing Neighborhoods

For a buyer weighing Plano against Frisco, McKinney, or another Collin County suburb, the practical takeaways are specific:

1. Don't assume Plano's price stability means less negotiating room. It means the inventory you're competing for is different in kind, not just price, from what's for sale in a growth-mode suburb.
2. If you're looking at a Collin Creek townhome, understand you're buying into a neighborhood still under active construction, with parks, a hotel, and full retail buildout not expected to complete for another couple of years.
3. If you're comparing an established resale home to new construction nearby, ask your agent how appraisers are treating the new-build comps. New construction priced meaningfully above or below older housing stock in the same ZIP code can pull resale appraisals in either direction, and that's a friction point that shows up at the closing table, not during the search.
4. If West Plano's luxury tier is on your radar, treat the AT&T campus as a multi-year story. Demolition happened in August 2026. Full occupancy and the broader economic impact Talley described will play out over the next several years, not the next few months.

A Few Common Questions

Will the new Collin Creek homes pull down prices in older Plano neighborhoods nearby? Not automatically, and not necessarily. New construction with strong builder incentives can occasionally soften nearby resale pricing power, but Collin Creek's product mix, smaller attached townhomes, is different enough from single-family resale housing that appraisers and buyers tend to treat them as separate comp pools rather than direct substitutes.

Does AT&T's headquarters guarantee Legacy West condo prices keep rising? It strengthens the case for sustained demand at the top of the market, but the campus won't be fully built and occupied for several years. Corporate anchors support long-term value more than short-term price spikes, and Legacy West's luxury condo tier was already priced well above the citywide median before AT&T's announcement.

Is now a good time to compare Plano to a faster-growing suburb like Celina or McKinney? It depends entirely on what you're optimizing for. If price stability and established infrastructure matter most, Plano's resale-dominated market offers exactly that. If you want more new-construction inventory to choose from and are comfortable with a market still working through builder discounting, the growth suburbs currently offer more room to negotiate.

Plano's median price has been quiet for two years running. The forces now moving underneath it, a $1.3 billion corporate campus on one end and a billion-dollar mall redevelopment on the other, aren't quiet at all. If you're trying to figure out which version of Plano actually fits your budget and timeline, that's a conversation worth having before you start comparing listings.

If you're weighing a move to Plano, or trying to make sense of how a specific neighborhood fits into this shifting picture, Jessica Cazares Team can walk you through what these changes mean for your specific search. Reach out for an instant home valuation or a market consultation built around the property you're actually considering, not just the citywide number.