The Portals Said Correction. May Set a Record.

The correction story was real. It was also already over.

In April and May, Plano made national headlines for the wrong reasons. Yahoo Finance, CultureMap, and a handful of housing portals ranked it among the top U.S. markets for home-value declines — typical values down roughly 5%, nearly $30,000 year-over-year, one of the sharpest drops in the country. The coverage wasn't fabricated. It was just describing a story that had already moved on.

I explained the mechanism in the March report. The softness in Plano’s citywide median wasn’t price weakness — it was product mix. Entry-level sales were elevated through Q1, and when a disproportionate share of transactions happen below $400K, the citywide median moves down whether or not the underlying assets are losing value. That’s not a correction. That’s math.

May closed with a citywide median of $589,500 — Plano’s highest single-month median on record, edging past the previous high of $585,000 set in May 2022. The portals are still publishing their correction narrative. The data published something else.

The YTD sales gap tells the same story from a different angle. Through Q1, 2026 was running well behind 2025 in total closings. That gap has narrowed every month since. Through May, YTD closings stand at 893 versus 941 in 2025 — a 5% deficit that could be mistaken for rounding error now.

None of this means the entire market is healthy. It means the market is stratified — and that the headline number is doing a poor job of describing either end of it. 75074 posted a -19% year-over-year price decline in May. 75093 posted a +1% gain with a $802,500 median sold price and 20 days on market. Those are not two readings of the same market. They are two different markets sharing a city boundary.

The Numbers That Need Context

75093 — West Plano’s strongest month in years. Forty-eight sales in May, up 41% from the same month last year. A $802,500 median. A $253 price-per-square-foot that leads every ZIP in the city. If you’ve been reading the national coverage calling Plano a correction market, 75093 didn’t get the memo. This is the ZIP that anchors the West Plano premium and May’s numbers suggest that premium isn’t softening. It’s hardening.

75074 — A lesson in reading year-over-year numbers. With 363 sales in 2025 — roughly one per day — 75074 runs at high volume. May’s $406,250 median looks like a -19% year-over-year decline on paper, but that comparison is measuring against an anomalous May 2025 spike. The full-year 2025 median for this ZIP was $405,000. May 2026 came in at $406,250. The national outlets citing East Plano price declines are reading a one-month comparison as a trend.

75075 — The fastest market in Plano. Eight median days on market. That’s not a typo. While the rest of the city averaged 17 days, 75075 was moving at roughly half the speed of everything else. Thirty-nine sales at a $525,000 median, up 8% year-over-year, with a sold-to-list ratio of 98.9%. This ZIP doesn’t generate headlines, but for a buyer trying to understand where competition is real and where it isn’t — this is the answer.

Notable Transaction — 6645 Whispering Woods Court

This one took patience.

Listed in 2025, this estate in Shoal Creek didn’t find its buyer the first time around. The sellers re-listed in February 2026 and closed on May 15th — 53 days on market the second time through.

The property is what you’d expect at this price point: six bedrooms, eight bathrooms, a heavily wooded half-acre lot, a gourmet kitchen with dual dishwashers and built-in refrigerators, and smart updates throughout.

The right property, priced correctly, still closes at the top of the market.

Inventory

Plano entered June with a supply picture that’s more balanced than the national narrative suggests — and more nuanced than a single headline number can capture.

At the entry level, below $400K, months of supply sits at 1.7. That’s still a seller’s market by any conventional measure. The mid-market between $400K and $750K is at 3.4 months — closer to balanced, with neither side holding a meaningful advantage.

The high-end tier between $750K and $1.5M is the softest at 3.9 months, reflecting the inventory build that’s been underway in that segment since early spring. But 3.9 months is not a distressed market — it’s a market where buyers have options and sellers need to be priced correctly.

The counterintuitive data point: luxury above $1.5M sits at 2.9 months — tighter than the high-end tier below it. The $3.295M Whispering Woods Court sale this month is consistent with that reading.

Supply, Demand, and What This Sets Up for Summer

Since the first week of April and throughout May, net new listings exceeded buyer purchase contracts. In other words, there are more sellers than buyers. Weeks 15 through 21 each showed more supply entering the market than contracts being written — a dynamic where inventory builds ups, which is what we see in months of supply numbers above.

Net new listings subtracts out cancelled and expired listings, showing the actual inventory change each week. Through May, 333 listings have cancelled or expired year-to-date, about 6% more than at this point in 2025. That uptick represents sellers who entered the market with expectations that weren’t meet, and quietly exited. The net new listings figure absorbs those failures. While cancelled and expired listings are generally perceived as negative, they help the market overall and prevent significant supply buildup.

What I’m Watching

Week 22 closed with contracts outpacing net new listings — 39 to 32 — but that single week doesn’t change the broader trend. The caveat: Week 22 included Memorial Day weekend, which reliably suppresses both listing activity and showing volume. The flip is real, but its magnitude is holiday-distorted. What it does set up is an interesting June — the contracts written in the final weeks of May are the closings that will define next month’s numbers.

As I’ve been reporting in my weekly market updates, active inventory has been growing every week this spring — the predictable result of net new listings consistently outpacing purchase contracts.

For buyers, this presents a genuine opportunity. More inventory means more choices and a better negotiating position. The irony is that it tends to produce the opposite of urgency — more choices generate more hesitation, more comparison, less enthusiasm. Buyers with options often behave like buyers who aren’t sure they want to buy.

For sellers, the math is straightforward and unforgiving. More competition means longer days on market and, eventually, price reductions to entice buyers who have stopped feeling rushed.

The historical parallel is worth knowing. In 2025, inventory built through spring and peaked in mid-July — then buyer contracts started outpacing listings, and buyers began absorbing the accumulated supply. Exhausted sellers who had been sitting on the market too long cancelled their listings, which paradoxically helped clear the backlog faster. It was that mid-summer inflection point — and how few people saw it coming — that inspired me to start publishing the weekly market reports in the first place.

Whether 2026 follows the same arc is the question I’m tracking every Friday. The setup looks similar. The timing may not be.