Before a buyer touring the Park Cities this year ever walks through a front door, they sign something. As of January 1, 2026, Texas law requires a written agreement between a buyer and a real estate agent before that agent can show a residential property, offer an opinion on it, or negotiate on the buyer's behalf. The old habit of touring a dozen homes with an agent and sorting out representation later is gone. Senate Bill 1968 eliminated it, and eliminated subagency along with it, so an agent who used to be able to walk you through a Highland Park estate while technically representing the seller can no longer do that without a signed agreement spelling out who they work for and how they get paid.
For most Dallas buyers this is a formality. For someone cross-shopping Highland Park against University Park, it changes the shopping process itself. These are two separate municipalities with two separate housing stocks, and a buyer who wants to see both fairly now has to commit to an agency relationship, or a short-term showing-only arrangement capped at 14 days, before they have toured enough of either town to know which one fits. The paperwork moment that used to come after the second or third showing now comes before the first.
That timing pressure matters more here than almost anywhere else in North Texas, because Highland Park and University Park are not variations on the same market. They are two different pricing systems that happen to share a school district and a ZIP-code boundary at Mockingbird Lane.
What the Portal Number Doesn't Tell You
Search either town and you'll land on an average home value. For Highland Park, that number sits around $2.8 million. It sounds like a starting point for comparison shopping. It isn't, because that average blends everything from a compact SMU-adjacent condo to a twelve-thousand-square-foot mansion on Beverly Drive. Active single-family listings in Highland Park carried a median asking price near $4.89 million as of July 2026, nearly double the citywide average. The gap between that blended average and what an estate buyer actually competes for is the first thing the number obscures.
The second thing it obscures is more useful, and it's the number a construction-informed buyer should actually be tracking: price per square foot.
| Highland Park | University Park | |
|---|---|---|
| Price per square foot (2026) | Near $1,000 | Near $704 |
| Days on market (June 2026) | About 38 | About 23 |
| Homes sold, June 2026 vs. year prior | 50, up from 43 | Faster pace, comparable volume gain |
| Typical teardown lot cost | $1.5M to $3M for land alone | Lower entry point, same scarcity logic |
| Annual teardown/rebuild projects | Roughly 20 to 30 | Fewer, but rising as older stock turns over |
That price-per-square-foot gap, close to $1,000 in Highland Park against roughly $700 in University Park, is not a story about better kitchens or newer HVAC systems next door. It's a story about how much of the purchase price is buying land instead of structure.
Highland Park Is Selling Dirt First
Highland Park covers 2.2 square miles and has almost no undeveloped land left. Every lot that comes to market is a lot someone else already built on, decades ago in most cases, since a significant share of the housing stock dates from the 1920s through the 1960s. When there's nowhere left to build new, the only way to add new inventory is to tear down something old, and that's exactly what happens roughly 20 to 30 times a year in Highland Park.
The mechanics are consistent enough to describe as a pattern rather than an exception. A buyer purchases an older home for the land underneath it, typically $1.5 million to $3 million depending on lot size, works with an architect and builder through the Highland Park Building Department's permitting process, and spends 12 to 18 months building. Total project costs for a 5,000 to 7,000 square foot custom home, land included, commonly land between $3.5 million and $7 million or more.
Once you see that pattern, the price-per-square-foot number stops looking like a quality signal and starts looking like a land-scarcity signal. A 1980s home built without much architectural distinction is, in practice, more likely to be torn down than a 1930s architect-designed home, because the building itself was never the asset buyers were competing for. The larger the lot, the more valuable the land per square foot, and standard Highland Park lots run close to 50 by 150 feet, which is part of why the rare three-quarter-acre or full-acre parcel commands such a premium when one surfaces.
University Park runs the same scarcity logic at a lower price point. There's very little undeveloped land left there either, and most new construction is a teardown or a substantial remodel rather than ground-up building on open lots. But the gap in price per square foot between the two towns suggests University Park hasn't hit the same ceiling on land value that Highland Park has, at least not yet. That gap is closing rather than holding steady. In April 2026, Park Cities price per square foot as a submarket rose 12.2 percent year over year to $849, even as the number of new listings surged 50 percent month over month. More supply came to market and the price per square foot kept climbing anyway, which is not what you'd expect if buyers were simply paying for square footage.
The Ground Both Towns Sit On
There's one equalizer buyers tend to overlook when they're choosing between a 1930s Highland Park estate and a newly built University Park custom home: both sit on the same expansive clay soil, and that soil moves.
Foundation movement is common across the Park Cities regardless of when a house was built. A century-old home with a century of renovation layers carries different foundation risk than a five-year-old custom build, but neither is immune, and a standard home inspection doesn't automatically include a dedicated foundation engineering assessment. That's a separate step, usually involving a structural engineer, and it matters most exactly when a buyer is deciding whether an older home is worth preserving or worth tearing down. If the foundation needs work regardless, that changes the math on whether the existing structure has any value left to protect, or whether the land was always the only asset in the deal.
For a buyer weighing Highland Park's older architectural stock against University Park's newer construction, that's a more useful comparison than square footage. The question isn't which town has newer plumbing. It's what an engineer finds when they actually look, and what that finding does to a renovation budget versus a rebuild budget.
What This Means If You're Choosing Between Them
Neither town is the better buy in the abstract. They solve different problems. University Park currently offers more house per dollar and a faster-moving market, with homes selling in roughly 23 days as of mid-2026, down sharply from 41 days a year earlier. Highland Park offers land in a town that has essentially stopped producing more of it, with a slower but still tightening 38-day average and a teardown pipeline mature enough to have become the default path to new construction.
University Park's retail core, Snider Plaza at Hillcrest and Lovers Lane, gives a sense of how seriously the smaller town invests in its infrastructure. The city approved a Public Improvement District in May 2026 specifically to fund long-term upkeep of that corridor, including an employee parking program designed to keep shop staff off residential streets. It's a small piece of municipal housekeeping, but it's the kind of hands-on management that comes with choosing an incorporated Park Cities address over unincorporated Dallas, and it's part of what buyers are paying for even when they're not thinking about it directly.
If you're planning to buy, renovate, or eventually rebuild in either town, the SB 1968 timeline means the representation conversation now happens on day one, not after you've walked a few houses and figured out what you actually want. That's worth having sorted out before you start touring, especially if Highland Park and University Park are both on your list.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do Highland Park and University Park share the same school district? Yes. Both towns are served by Highland Park Independent School District, even though Highland Park High School itself is physically located in University Park on Emerson Avenue.
Do I need to sign something before an agent shows me a Park Cities home? As of January 1, 2026, yes. Texas law now requires a written agreement, either a buyer representation agreement or a short-term showing-only agreement, before a licensed agent can show you a residential property or give you a professional opinion about it.
Is foundation movement something to expect in older Park Cities homes specifically? It's common across both towns regardless of the home's age, because the underlying issue is the region's expansive clay soil rather than construction era. A dedicated foundation inspection by a structural engineer is a separate step from a standard home inspection and worth requesting either way.
Choosing between Highland Park and University Park comes down to how you want your budget split between land and structure, and that split looks different on paper than it does when you're standing in a kitchen. If you're weighing that decision, or thinking through what a teardown lot or a renovation-ready home actually costs to bring up to Park Cities standard, Donna Hartley has spent 15 years and two personal home builds learning exactly where that math holds up and where it doesn't. Schedule a free consultation to talk through your specific situation before you sign anything.
