Plano's Median Price Rose in 2025 While Frisco, McKinney, and Celina Fell. The Reason Isn't Demand.

If you're cross-shopping Plano against Frisco or McKinney right now, you've probably pulled up a portal, looked at "Sold" prices side by side, and started drawing conclusions about which suburb is hotter. Here's the problem with that exercise: in Texas, the number you're looking at usually isn't the number the home actually sold for.

Texas is a non-disclosure state. No law requires a seller, a buyer, or a broker to report the closing price to a government agency, and portals can't legally publish a number they were never required to receive. What you see as "Sold: $550,000" is frequently the last list price, not the negotiated close. A $20,000 closing-cost credit, a seller-paid rate buydown, a post-inspection price cut folded into repairs instead of the contract price: none of it shows up on the public side. Only a licensed agent pulling actual MLS closing data sees the real number.

That gap matters more than usual right now, because the obvious story about Plano versus its neighbors is wrong, or at least incomplete, and the real mechanism behind it is one most portal-based comparisons will never surface.

The Number Everyone's Citing

In 2025, Plano was the only major Collin County city where the median home price moved up year over year. Neighboring suburbs moved the other direction over the same period:

Read at face value, that table looks like a demand story: buyers wanted Plano more than they wanted Frisco, McKinney, or Celina. That's not what happened. What happened is a supply story, and it hinges on something most buyers never think to ask about a city's median price: how many of the homes counted in that median were brand new.

Why New Construction Is the Actual Variable

Plano sold roughly 19 new-construction homes in 2025, under 1 percent of its total transaction volume. Frisco, McKinney, and Celina are still growth-mode suburbs with builders actively closing out subdivisions, and when buyer demand softened in 2025, those builders didn't hold their price. They shifted to lower-priced product lines to keep sales moving. Every one of those discounted new builds gets counted in the city-wide median, and enough of them will drag the whole number down even if resale homes in the same city held steady.

Plano avoided that drag for a simple structural reason: it's mostly built out. A resale-dominated market doesn't have a builder in the mix cutting prices to clear inventory, so its median reflects owner-to-owner sales at owner-to-owner pricing. That's not proof Plano is more desirable than McKinney. It's proof Plano has almost no new-construction category left to distort its own numbers.

The Anchor Behind West Plano's Premium

The other piece reinforcing Plano's position isn't a market trend. It's a single corporate decision.

In January 2026, AT&T confirmed it's relocating its global headquarters from downtown Dallas to a new 54-acre campus at 5400 Legacy Drive in Plano's Legacy District, the site of the former Electronic Data Systems campus. The project carries a reported $1.3 billion price tag, with partial occupancy targeted for late 2028. Plano's City Council approved $20 million in incentives on February 23, 2026, split between campus redevelopment and job-creation commitments, including a 65 percent property tax rebate running 25 years once the rebate clock starts, which AT&T can choose to begin as early as January 2029.

This is the first headquarters relocation of this scale that Plano has landed, and it consolidates AT&T's Central Dallas, Irving, and Plano administrative space into one site. For anyone evaluating West Plano specifically, that's a multi-year demand signal that has nothing to do with this month's interest rate and everything to do with a company committing to thousands of employees in one location through the early 2030s. Legacy West was already Plano's premium corridor. AT&T's arrival extends that premium timeline well past the current market cycle.

Where the Non-Disclosure Gap Actually Costs You

Here's where the portal problem stops being an abstraction and starts being a dollar figure.

Plano's own 2025 data shows a stark split based on pricing discipline. Homes that sold within their first week on the market achieved 100 percent of asking price. Homes that sat 90 days or longer sold for 90 percent of their original list. On Plano's median home, that 10-point gap works out to roughly $54,000, the cost of a seller pricing to hope instead of pricing to what comparable homes actually closed for in the last 60 days.

That last phrase is the catch. If you're pricing off portal data in a non-disclosure state, "what comparable homes actually closed for" isn't something you can verify without MLS access, because the portal number is frequently the list price a seller started with, not what they accepted. A seller who prices against an inflated public number will find their own home sitting past that 90-day mark, and the mechanism that made Plano's median look strong in 2025 works in reverse against any individual seller who misreads it.

There's also a quieter number sitting behind all of this: 616 Plano properties came to market in 2025 and withdrew rather than adjust to what buyers were actually paying. That's roughly 3.2 months of sales volume sitting on the sidelines instead of transacting, inventory that could reappear the moment sellers recalibrate to real pricing rather than list-price wishing.

The Variable That Could Undo the Pattern

The mechanism that protected Plano's median in 2025, almost no new construction, is not a permanent feature of the city. Three projects moving through Plano in 2026, Collin Creek, Willow Bend, and Haggard Farms, could add roughly 500 homes to the market, an inventory increase of about 22 percent.

If even a portion of that new supply comes in at builder-discounted pricing the way it did in Frisco, McKinney, and Celina, the exact dynamic that spared Plano's 2025 median disappears. There's already a hint of this in the most current data available. Plano's median sale price over the three months ending May 2026 came in around $520,000, down 5.5 percent from the same period a year earlier, and the Zillow Home Value Index for Plano as of June 2026 showed values down 2.4 percent over the past year. Whether that's early softening tied to the new-construction pipeline or a broader regional cooling that's touching every DFW suburb isn't something a single quarter of data can settle. It's the number worth watching for anyone timing a Plano purchase against these three developments specifically.

A Few Questions Worth Asking Before You Compare Cities on a Portal

If Texas doesn't disclose sale prices, how does anyone get real comps? Licensed agents pull actual closing prices through the MLS, which brokers are required to report even though the state itself never receives that figure. That access is the difference between a portal estimate and a defensible comp.

Does the 500-home pipeline mean Plano prices will fall the way Frisco and McKinney did in 2025? Not necessarily, and not automatically. It means the structural advantage that shielded Plano's median in 2025, minimal new construction, is about to be tested for the first time in years. Whether Collin Creek, Willow Bend, and Haggard Farms come in at a discount or at a premium tied to the AT&T relocation will likely determine which way it goes.

Is the AT&T move already priced into West Plano homes? Some of it likely is, since the announcement is now seven months old. Full occupancy isn't expected until late 2028, so the employment and housing-demand effects tied to that move are still building rather than fully realized.

If you're weighing Plano against Frisco, McKinney, or any other Collin County suburb and want the real closing numbers behind the portal listings, not the list-price version, message Harman on WhatsApp through HXC Real Estate to start your DFW home search or investment plan.