If your Highland Village listing expired, the honest first question is not “was the price too high.” It is “what was the price built on.” In this city, more listings than sellers realize are priced around water the seller does not actually own — and the deal does not die at the number, it dies the week a buyer reads the easement.
The lakefront premium the Corps of Engineers never agreed to
Highland Village sits on the south side of the western branch of Lewisville Lake. The lake and the land at its edge belong to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which owns and operates Lewisville Lake and does not permit private structures on the shoreline it owns. The Corps is not issuing new dock or boathouse permits here. Only a handful of docks exist on the lake at all, carried on permits issued in the 1960s and 1970s. The only way to get one is to buy a property that already holds an active permit.
Now look at how lake-adjacent homes here get marketed. A lakefront page in circulation as of August 2026 advertises “private docks” and “water access” with no mention of Corps restrictions. A seller reads that, prices in a waterfront premium, and lists. A buyer tours, falls for the view, then does diligence — and finds Corps-owned land between the back fence and the water, no dock, and no permit available to build one.
Then comes the second layer. Shoreline property carries a flowage easement — private land on which the government holds a perpetual right to let water rise, defined as everything below the 537.0 foot mean-sea-level contour against a normal operating pool of 522 feet. Changes inside it need Corps approval. If a deck extension, retaining wall, or pool house sits below that line without it, title or the lender surfaces it late, the appraisal gets conditioned, and the contract unwinds in the final ten days. The house comes back on market with an ugly day count, and it expires.
Sellers in this situation are almost never told what happened. They are told the market softened. It didn’t. The premise of the listing was wrong, and the buyer worked that out before the seller did. It is fixable — but only if someone names it before the house goes back on.
Two towns, one ZIP, and a comp set that blends them
Highland Village’s residential ZIP is 75077. So is the Town of Double Oak’s. Double Oak is zoned to a one-acre minimum lot on septic at a city tax rate of $0.178384 per $100 for FY2025-26. Highland Village runs municipal water and sewer on far smaller lots at $0.500984 for the same year — close to three times the rate next door. Every ZIP-level automated valuation and every “homes in 75077” comp pull silently mixes those two markets. Anchor to a 75077 number and you can start meaningfully high on day one without seeing the error. It runs in reverse for sellers in Double Oak, whose acre gets read against quarter-acre comps.
The rate bites a second way. Highland Village also sits about $0.114 per $100 above Flower Mound’s $0.387277 — roughly $568 a year more on a $500,000 taxable value. A buyer cross-shopping at the same sticker runs the payment with escrow and finds this side of the line costs more per month for the same house. A listing priced to a Flower Mound comp was not priced to the payment, and the payment is what buyers shop.
Where the $400K to $1M houses are
Here that band is not the luxury tier — it is essentially the whole market, which means the competition is dense and a house 5% high is instantly visible beside near-identical alternatives.
- Highland Shores — the neighborhood that sets the city’s price narrative: 980 acres, more than 1,800 homes built 1984 to 2005, 1,976 to 6,000 square feet, HOA dues of $820 to $1,100 a year, median sale price $629,900 at about $297 per square foot as of August 2026. The Overlook is its upper sub-section.
- Briarhill Estates — roughly 450 homes built 1987 to 1995, 2,547 to 4,607 square feet, on 0.20 to 0.25 acre lots. Quarter-acre lots, in a city that markets like estates.
- Castlewood, Chapel Hill, Chapel Springs, Canyon Creek Estates, Lakewood, Rolling Hills Estates, Wichita Estates — the pockets filling the $700K to $1M tier. Two August 2026 data points: a 4,149 square foot Castlewood home at $849,000 and a 3,663 square foot Chapel Hill home at $750,000.
- Ladera — the only newer product in town: 102 mostly single-story homes on Chinn Chapel Road built from 2016, 1,654 to 2,513 square feet, in an age-restricted community.
Be careful with citywide medians — a thin high-end lakefront segment swings them hard month to month. The most defensible anchor is the city’s own: an average home value of $590,092 in the FY2025-26 budget.
The other reasons listings stall here
Your buyer’s insurance quote, not your roof
Most inventory in your band was built between roughly 1984 and 2000, and that cohort carries a predictable inspection profile. Polybutylene supply plumbing was made from 1978 to mid-1995 and adopted heavily by Sun Belt builders; it grows brittle and fails at the fittings, and many insurers now refuse to write it, price it up, or exclude water damage. A 1991 Briarhill house is squarely inside that window.
Roofs compound it. Dallas, Collin, Denton and Tarrant counties logged more than 1,800 storms from 2020 to 2025 — half of them hail — causing over $2.3 billion in damage, with homeowners averaging more than $4,000 a year, up about 80% since 2020, and nonrenewal complaints to the Texas Department of Insurance rose from 79 in 2023 to 190 in 2024. The 2026 stall is no longer “the roof looks old.” It is that your buyer cannot get an affordable bindable quote — a financing failure wearing a condition costume. Underneath sits Eagle Ford and Blackland Prairie clay that swells wet, shrinks dry, and can move as much as seven inches, drawn unevenly by mature trees on a quarter-acre lot. If your listing died on an inspection finding, what to repair versus what to price around is a strategy call.
Your street, and your school data
The FY2025-26 budget funds $7.4 million in roadwork: $5.515 million rebuilding Highland Village Shores Boulevard from Briarhill Boulevard to Twin Coves starting 2026, and $1.56 million on Highland Village Road out to the KCS Railroad crossing, expected Spring 2026 and running 10 to 11 months. A listing that sat through that had torn pavement in every drive-up photo and detoured showings. That is a timing problem with a timing answer.
Separately, Lewisville ISD closed Highland Village Elementary at 301 Brazos Blvd effective 2025-26, rezoning its 378 students to McAuliffe and Heritage, both here, with students staying zoned to Briarhill Middle and Marcus High. One mix-up worth correcting: Garden Ridge Elementary closed in the same action, but it is at 2220 S Garden Ridge Blvd in Flower Mound, not Highland Village. Old listing copy and school widgets still show the closed campus — a buyer verifies, finds it wrong, and stops trusting the rest of the listing. Check the zone with the LISD school locator before you relist.
Competition inside your own city
A 1990s two-story with stairs, an HOA, an aging roof and possible polybutylene competes for the same downsizing buyer as a ten-year-old single-story at Ladera with an activity center, pool, pickleball court and putting green — inside the city limits. Add corridor ambiguity: TxDOT’s FM 407 widening is 11.5 miles at an estimated $235 million, currently unfunded, with letting anticipated no earlier than 2028. And if you are near Unity Park at 2200 Briarhill Boulevard, the mid-August balloon festival can cost a weekend of showings you could not spare.
What this means for your relaunch
The backdrop is real but not dramatic. Denton County months of inventory moved from 3.3 months in January 2026 to 3.9 months in March 2026, and across DFW the median seller price cut ran $15,000, or 3.6% off original list, with average days on market at 82 through March 2026. That is the observed size of a Texas mispricing error — so if you took one cut and still did not sell, you were likely still above the market.
A relaunch here usually fixes three things at once: what the listing claims about the water, what the price is built on, and what the inspection and insurance file will say before a lender says it. That is the work in a full relisting review, at no charge. To start with the number instead, send the address and Meredith will pull your listing history and build comps for your pocket of the city. Still working out what went wrong? Start with why listings expire here.
Every figure above is cited to its source with the period it covers, and these move. Reported median sale price and days on market vary widely between portals because they measure different things on a modest monthly sale count. When Meredith prices your house she works from current NTREIS data for your neighborhood and price band — not town averages, and never a 75077 ZIP-level blend.
ZIP codes: 75077
Last updated September 21, 2026