Why one price tracker disagrees with the next
Ask three real estate sites for Grayson County’s median home price and you’ll get three different numbers. That’s not a data error: it’s three different measurements of three different things.
Realtor.com’s tracker, hosted publicly through the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, measures what sellers are asking: $349,950 as of June 2026, down 7.1% year over year as of the May 2026 reading. Orchard, pulling from MLS closed-sale records, measures what buyers are actually paying: a median of $293,750 over the trailing 30 days. The roughly $56,000 gap between those two numbers is the list-to-sold spread, a real and measurable market condition. Orchard’s own data puts the county’s sale-to-list ratio at 93.59%, and 54.35% of active listings had a price cut in the same period. Sellers are still asking prices set closer to the market’s peak; buyers increasingly are not paying them.
Time window matters just as much as list-versus-sold. A median measured over the trailing 30 days moves differently than one measured over a trailing 3 months, especially in a county this size, where a single high-value closing in Gunter can swing a monthly figure that a longer window would smooth out.
The mistake to avoid: treating any single site’s number as a fixed price tag instead of a directional read that depends on window and method.
Why do two housing sites show different median prices for the same county?They’re usually measuring different things: asking price versus closed sale price, or different trailing time windows. Check which one a figure represents before comparing it to another site’s number.
Six housing markets under one county name
Grayson County’s 15 incorporated cities don’t behave like one market. A per-city breakdown from Ownwell’s property tax data, built from Grayson Central Appraisal District figures, makes the spread concrete: Southmayd’s median home value of $102,023 sits at roughly a sixth of Gunter’s $596,228, and the tax bill gap is wider still once local rate differences compound the value gap.
| City | Median home value | Effective tax rate | Median tax bill | Profile |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sherman | $213,684 | 2.05% | $3,934 | Urban core, semiconductor employment center |
| Denison | $188,106 | 2.20% (county’s highest) | $3,713 | Urban core, historic downtown, highest effective rate |
| Pottsboro | $239,276 | 1.39% | $3,044 | Lake Texoma recreation and second-home market |
| Van Alstyne | $355,981 | 1.97% | $6,820 | Growth corridor toward Collin County |
| Gunter | $596,228 (county’s highest) | 1.71% | $9,242 (county’s highest) | Luxury and estate growth market |
| Southmayd | $102,023 (county’s lowest) | ~2.01% | $1,699 | Rural, most affordable entry point |
Denison’s 2.20% effective rate is the highest in the county despite mid-range home values. A buyer comparing only sticker prices between Denison and Pottsboro would miss that a cheaper Denison home can carry a tax bill close to a pricier Pottsboro one, because the rate difference offsets most of the value gap.
Sherman and Denison: the urban core
These two cities anchor the county’s job base and its highest tax rates. Sherman holds the concentration of semiconductor employment described later in this page; Denison sits just north, absorbing overflow demand as that workforce grows.
Van Alstyne and Gunter: the growth corridor
Both sit on the Collin County side of the county, closest to the Dallas-Fort Worth build-out and the tollway extension TxDOT is currently studying. Highest price points in the county follow from that proximity.
Pottsboro and Gordonville: the lake towns
Bordering Lake Texoma, these carry a different buyer profile: recreation and second homes rather than commuter housing, and a different flood-map history than the inland cities, covered in the risk section below.
Southmayd and the smaller rural towns
The affordability floor of the county. Lower values and generally lower tax bills come with longer commutes to Sherman’s job centers.
What buying here costs after the 2026 exemption increase
Texas raised the general school-district homestead exemption from $100,000 to $140,000 under Proposition 13, approved by voters in November 2025, effective for the 2026 tax year. On top of that statutory floor, Tax Code Section 11.13(n) lets any taxing unit, city, county, or special district, adopt its own additional exemption of up to 20% of appraised value. Whether a specific Grayson County city or district has done so is a local decision, so the practical exemption a given buyer receives can run well above the $140,000 statutory minimum.
| Cost item | Amount | Note |
|---|---|---|
| School-district homestead exemption | $140,000 off appraised value | Statutory minimum, Tax Code ยง11.13(b), effective 2026 |
| Additional local option exemption | Up to 20% of appraised value | Adopted per jurisdiction, not guaranteed countywide |
| Annual appraisal increase cap (homestead only) | 10% per year | Applies starting the second year of ownership with an active exemption |
| County median effective tax rate | 1.71% | After typical exemptions, Ownwell, April 2026 |
| County median annual tax bill | $3,795 | Ranges $1,447 to $9,242 by city, see table above |
A buyer holding the exemption era’s original $40,000 figure in mind is shielding roughly three and a half times as much value from school taxes today. It’s the single biggest lever in what a Grayson County home costs to hold, and it has nothing to do with the purchase price.
How much did the Texas homestead exemption change in 2026?It rose from $100,000 to $140,000 for school-district taxes under Proposition 13, approved by voters in November 2025. Homeowners 65 or older or disabled get an additional $10,000 on top of that.
Flood exposure along the Red River and Lake Texoma
FEMA finalized new flood maps for Grayson County on September 1, 2022, replacing the previous maps and requiring local floodplain ordinances to update in response. That’s the most recent authoritative word on the county’s flood boundaries.
What FEMA’s county-level release doesn’t provide is a public, per-city breakdown of how that risk concentrates. Geographically, exposure isn’t spread evenly: Pottsboro, Gordonville, and the Denison shoreline sit directly against Lake Texoma and the Red River, where floodplain mapping typically concentrates in a county like this, while inland cities like Van Alstyne and Southmayd sit well away from either. A buyer looking at a specific address near the lake should pull that parcel’s current flood zone directly from FEMA’s Flood Map Service Center. A single blended county figure can’t tell a lakefront lot from an inland one.
Is Grayson County at high risk of flooding?The county’s flood maps were fully updated as of September 1, 2022. Risk isn’t uniform: it concentrates near the Red River and Lake Texoma shoreline. Check the specific parcel on FEMA’s Map Service Center rather than assuming a countywide figure applies to any one address.
Buying as an investment while the fabs ramp up
Texas Instruments’ Sherman fab reached production in December 2025, and GlobiTech’s separate $5 billion facility adds roughly 1,500 more jobs to the same labor market. Sherman’s own population, around 45,000, is expected by city officials to grow by several thousand residents a year as that workforce arrives, pressure that shows up first in rental demand, before it shows up in resale prices.
What this page can’t responsibly give an investor is a Grayson County cap rate or price-to-rent figure. No dataset found during research publishes one at the county level, and estimating one would mean inventing a number. What an investor can reasonably check instead:
- Which cities are absorbing the job growth directly. Sherman, and to a lesser extent Denison, sit closest to the TI and GlobiTech sites; commute-distance cities capture spillover more slowly.
- Whether a target property’s tax rate is Denison-level (2.20%) or Trenton-level (0.95%). That spread alone can change a rental property’s break-even rent by hundreds of dollars a month.
- Local rental vacancy and permit data from the city itself, not the county. A county-wide figure blends a tight urban core with a slow rural periphery.
Selling into a slower, still-competitive market
Grayson County’s median days-on-market currently runs 67.67, up from 43.14 a year earlier. Homes are taking noticeably longer to sell than they were. More than half of active listings, 54.35%, have had at least one price reduction. Sellers who price close to what the earlier section’s sale-to-list figure implies are still closing near ask, just more slowly than in the tightest years of the market.
Checking whether a listed home sits inside the county
Grayson County’s northern boundary runs along the Red River and Lake Texoma, across from Oklahoma. Real estate search tools group listings by MLS market area, which doesn’t always match county or state lines exactly. Before treating any specific listing as a Grayson County property, confirm the county and state on the appraisal-district record, not just the search filter that surfaced it.
How do I confirm a listing is actually inside Grayson County and not across the state line?Check the property’s county and state on its appraisal-district record, not the site’s location filter. Grayson County’s northern border runs along the Red River and Lake Texoma, and MLS market areas don’t always align exactly with county or state boundaries.
What’s built and what’s still coming
The Texas Department of Transportation is studying a 37-mile extension of the Dallas North Tollway through Grayson County, running from near Gunter, south of the Collin County line, north to US 75 in Denison, meant to relieve US 75 truck traffic and connect the county to the Dallas-Fort Worth build-out. The first physical piece of that corridor is already open: Grayson Parkway, a $9.2 million, roughly 4.5-mile free service road linking FM 121 to the Collin County line, opened on September 1, 2023, as the funded precursor to the eventual tollway.
Layered on top of that road project is the semiconductor investment itself. Texas Instruments’ Sherman site is planned for up to four connected fabs, with the first now in production and up to $40 billion in eventual investment. GlobiTech’s separate $5 billion plant adds roughly 1,500 more jobs to the same corridor. Between the tollway study and the fab build-out, the county’s growth signal for the next decade is unusually concrete for a market this size.
Leave a Reply