The Homes That Didn't Sell: 576 Listings Came Off the Market in 2026
Three days before Halloween, let me show you the scariest number in our market — and it isn’t on anybody’s porch. Since January 1, 1,645 listings in our eight school districts have reached the end of the road, one way or the other. 1,069 of them sold and closed. The other 576 — more than one in three — came off the market without a sale. No closing day, no moving truck. Just a sign coming out of the yard.
The gray bars are only half the story, because most of the people reading this don’t own a brand-new builder home — you own an existing home. Strip the builders out and the picture changes in a hurry. Builders lost just 18% of their listings this year. Existing homes failed at 43% — better than four in ten. And the gap is widest exactly where the headline numbers look best. Pilot Point ISD posts a 27% overall failure rate, among the lowest in the area — but that’s the builders talking. An existing home in Pilot Point ISD failed 49% of the time this year. A coin flip. Sanger ISD tells the same story more quietly, and in Gainesville ISD it didn’t matter who you were — half the existing homes that tried this year didn’t make it. The small districts — Tioga ISD, Collinsville ISD, Valley View ISD — swing on a handful of listings, but that is the market there.
So what did the 576 do wrong? They followed a pattern, and it rhymes with what I showed you last week. They asked more: the listings that failed were asking a median of $180 a square foot while the homes that actually sold closed at $167 — about 8% apart, and in Whitesboro ISD the gap was 11%. They sat: half were on the market more than three and a half months, and one in four sat past six. And here’s the part that should stop you — 54% of them did cut their price before giving up, by a median of $19,000, and it still wasn’t enough. That’s last week’s lesson proven in reverse: a listing gets its biggest wave of buyer attention in the first three weeks, and a price cut made in month four can’t win back the buyers who already passed in week one.
That’s exactly why the right local knowledge matters before the sign ever goes in the yard. A DFW-wide average or a national website’s algorithm can’t tell you that an existing home in Pilot Point ISD is playing a completely different game than the builder two streets over — or what number actually clears the market on your street, this winter, against this competition. Thirty-four years of selling homes in our area is what lets me strip the builders out of your comps and give you the honest read. If you’re one of this year’s 576 — your listing ended and nothing happened — I’d welcome the conversation about what went wrong and what a second try should look like. And if you’re thinking about listing for the first time, even better: let’s get the number right before the yard sign, not after. I’m here to help.
Chance Kirby - Irick Real Estate
940.300.6900
Want to know what this means for your home? Call or text Chance Kirby at (940) 300-6900 for a free price opinion based on recent sales near you.
