Luxury Home Buying Rankings Put Dallas as 10th Most Expensive Starter Metropolis — With Houston and San Antonio Much Lower

We’re not sure that the science is perfect but the concept is entertaining when conjuring what the threshold sales price is for a home to be considered “luxury” in various cities across the country. Just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, perhaps so is luxury.

Nevertheless, My Affordable Luxury blog has analyzed numbers from Zillow and Redfin to determine what the starting point is for buying a “luxury” home in 51 metropolises, that luxury being determined by pricing of the Top 10 percent of real estate listings in each market. (We, however, would have preferred the research referencing MetroTex Association of Realtors and the Houston Association of Realtors. But this was their study and not ours.)

Four Texas cities were included in the analysis and Dallas comes in at No. 10 nationwide with $1.85 million as the starting point for “luxury” properties. The top listing in that market is $22.5 million.

Austin checked in at 14 with its luxury home entry level at $1.75 million and the highest asking price in the state’s capitol is $12,999,000.

Houston ranked No. 21, which could be somewhat insulting as well off Houstonians for the most part consider H-Town to glow high on the luxury living scale. My Affordable Luxury’s calculation reasons that $1.2 million will get you into a luxury property as that is the starting point for the Top 10 percent of listings in Houston.

As we said, luxury is in the eye of the beholder. For clearly, the River Oaks, Tanglewood and Memorial crowd, $1.2 million is a mere starter home. Whereas the priciest listing in Houston is $29.50 million. Now we are talking luxury.

San Antonio weighed in at No. 51 with the luxury home sales market starting at $535,000 and the highest listing there coming in at $6.75 million. We would assume that half a million goes a lot further in San Antonio than in her Texas brethren.

While you can find the entire list here, we’ll fill you in on a few of the interesting finds from this evaluation.

Manhattan topped the list with the priciest 10 percent of home listings starting at $6,495,000 with its most expensive listing an astounding $90 million. That top listing price is easily beat by Los Angeles which boasts an astronomical listing of $160 million and the entry level for “luxury” defined at $4.999 million.

Coming in behind those in descending order are San Diego, San Francisco, Boston, Honolulu, San Jose, Washington D.C. and Texas’ beloved Dallas.