Southlake

Southlake sits at the northern edge of Tarrant County, almost entirely inside Carroll ISD, and it is the most expensive large residential market in the county. Its neighbour Westlake is pricier still, but it is a different kind of market and has its own page.

Over the three years ending September 2026, Southlake produced 1,153 closed sales at a $1,350,000 median. I'm a Texas broker and a Certified Residential Appraiser. Here is what those sales show.

Southlake is appreciating faster than anywhere I measure

Controlling for house size, lot size and build year, values in Southlake are up 4.77% a year, at p < 0.0001.

That is the strongest appreciation I have found in any market in this county, and the raw medians carry it without any modelling:

Price per foot up roughly 20% across the window. Against a county where seventeen of thirty-six Fort Worth ZIP codes are losing value, that is a different market operating under different conditions.

But one house in six never sells

Here is the part that almost never appears in coverage of expensive neighbourhoods, and it is the single most useful thing on this page.

The listing figures overstate, because a house that lists, expires, relists and sells counts twice as a failure. So I collapse the record by parcel number, which counts each property once.

Even collapsed: about one Southlake property in six that came to market over three years never found a buyer. Next door in Westlake, across the estate subdivisions, it is two in five.

This is what a thin market looks like from the inside. The buyer pool for a $1.35 million house is a fraction of the pool for a $350,000 one, and the pool for a $4 million Westlake estate is smaller again. High prices and high appreciation do not mean easy transactions — they frequently mean the opposite, and the failure rate is where that shows up.

The corollary matters if you're selling: Southlake sells quickly when it sells at all. Median 17 days, 34.7% under contract within a week. The distribution is bimodal — houses either find their buyer fast or they don't find one. There is not much of a middle, and a list price that needs correcting has usually already missed.

What it costs

• Median close $1,350,000 on 4,043 square feet — about $346 per foot
• Median lot 20,081 square feet — nearly half an acre; median build year 1998
• Closed prices ran $295,000 to $12,700,000
• Median 17 days at 96.7% of original list
• Effective property tax rate about 1.30%
• 73.3% had a pool; 79% carry HOA dues at a $1,300 median
• Only 32.7% closed with seller concessions

Carroll ISD covers 1,013 of the 1,153 sales, with 103 in Keller ISD and 36 in Northwest ISD. Carroll is the reason a great deal of this market exists, and I have measured what it is worth from the outside: inside Grapevine, Carroll-zoned houses carry a premium of 11 to 14% over Grapevine-Colleyville ISD depending on how tightly the comparison is drawn — the largest school effect I have measured anywhere in the county.

Inside Southlake itself the district is nearly universal, so there is no meaningful comparison to draw — which is its own useful fact. In Southlake the district is not a variable. It is the baseline.

The model is clear on what does vary: size at a coefficient of 0.92, close to proportional, so per-foot figures behave reasonably here; lot at 0.11, modest on already-large lots; and vintage at +1.00% per year, significant, which on stock spanning 1980 to 2025 is a substantial adjustment.

On the biggest lots, you're mostly buying land

With a median lot near half an acre, land is a real part of a Southlake price, so I priced it directly. Sixty-three vacant lot sales over the same three years put Southlake land at a median of about $22.50 per square foot.

Subtract an estimate of the land from each closed sale and look at what's left per foot of house:

The headline figure rises with lot size. The house-only figure falls. At the top end, roughly three-quarters of what a buyer pays is the ground. Across the city the median land share is about half.

Two cautions. Some of the drop reflects older houses sitting on the largest parcels, not only the land arithmetic. And this is an aggregate, not a way to value a specific lot — frontage, trees, topography and what can be built all move land price. But it does mean a per-foot comparison between a house on a third of an acre and one on an acre and a half is comparing two different things.

Against its neighbours, Southlake land ranks third of the markets I measure: Westlake about $44.74 a foot, Grapevine $27.85, Southlake $22.50, Colleyville $21.69, Keller $14.88, North Richland Hills $8.13 and Fort Worth $7.49. Except for Grapevine, where lots are small, that order closely follows which cities are appreciating.

How the top of the county compares

Read down that table and two things line up almost perfectly. Appreciation rises with price. And so does the chance your house doesn't sell.

Southlake owners gained roughly 4.8% a year and faced a one-in-six chance of not transacting. Grapevine owners were flat and faced one in ten. That is the actual trade at the top of this county, and it rarely gets stated: you are buying appreciation and liquidity risk at the same time.

Which is also the mirror image of what's happening at the other end. Across Fort Worth, seventeen of thirty-six measurable ZIP codes are losing value, and the declines concentrate in the cheapest half of the city. The two ends of Tarrant County are not experiencing the same market in any sense.

If you're selling in Southlake

The appreciation is real and it is on your side. The liquidity is not, and that is the risk to manage.

One property in six here doesn't sell. The ones that do sell mostly go inside three weeks, which tells you the market makes up its mind quickly. A list price set on aspiration rather than on the last six months of closings doesn't get corrected into a sale often — it gets absorbed into that 17%.

Three things decide it: the comparable set built from your actual size and lot rather than a citywide per-foot figure; a first two weeks that are genuinely ready, because that is when this market decides; and a realistic view of what the pool of buyers at your number actually looks like.

On the pre-listing work, the order matters more than the budget — what to fix before you list, and in what order has the sequence, tested against 33,000 closings, and three improvements that turned out to be worth nothing. If the work needs doing and the cash is tied up, Compass Concierge covers it up front and is repaid at closing.

Buying or selling in Southlake

Twelve hundred sales, one dominant school district, half-acre lots, the strongest appreciation in the county, and a one-in-six chance that a listing never transacts.

What I can tell you is what the closed sales on houses your size, your lot and your section of the market actually support, how wide the range around that is, and how much of your price is the land underneath the house.

Browse active listings in this price range, or call or text (682) 207-4310, or send me a note.

Figures are medians and model results from NTREIS listings and closed sales in Southlake, and vacant land sales in Tarrant County, for the three years ending September 2026, reported in aggregate. Land-residual figures are estimates. School attendance boundaries, tax rates, HOA dues and market conditions change — confirm current figures for a specific address before relying on them. Nothing here is an appraisal or a valuation of any particular property.