This August, you could read that Cary home prices fell 8.5 percent in a year, or that they rose 3.5 percent. Both claims cite Wake County sales data. Neither one is wrong. That gap is the story, and it matters more to a buyer cross-shopping Cary right now than either number does on its own.
Here's the spread, pulled from four sources all looking at Cary sales within weeks of each other this summer.
| Source | Time window | Median sale price | YoY change | Price per sq ft |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Redfin | 3 months ending June 2026 | $645,000 | down 0.75% | $264 (down 1.1%) |
| Doorify MLS, via a Cary brokerage's market update | July 2026 | $630,000 | down 8.5% | $261 (down 2.6%) |
| Houzeo | Mid-2026 (sales volume figure tied to June 2026) | $645,000 | up 3.53% | not broken out |
| Zillow (typical home value) | as of early August 2026 | $600,054 | down 1.4% | not broken out |
Four datasets, four different stories about direction, and a range of roughly $45,000 in what counts as "the median." If you're deciding between Cary, Apex, and Morrisville based on a single headline number, you're standing on ground that moves depending on which site you loaded.
Why one city produces four different answers
The discrepancy isn't sloppy math. Redfin, Zillow, and Houzeo pull from public records and MLS feeds on different cutoff dates and smooth their numbers differently. The Doorify MLS figures, reported directly by a Cary-based brokerage using closed transactions, showed something specific: closed sales jumped 22.4 percent year over year in July even as the median price fell 8.5 percent, while price per square foot dropped a much smaller 2.6 percent. Homes still sold in a median of 17 days.
That combination, more sales, a much steeper drop in the headline price than in the price-per-square-foot figure, and no slowdown in how fast homes move, is what a mix shift looks like. It happens when the basket of homes selling in a given month changes. If Cary sold proportionally more $350,000 condos and fewer $800,000 single-family homes in July 2026 than in July 2025, the median falls hard even though no individual home lost much value. Price per square foot, which normalizes for size, catches this. The citywide median doesn't.
Cary has a specific reason to be producing more of that mix-shift noise than a town like Apex right now: it's running out of land.
The pipeline that's changing what "a home in Cary" means
Cary is a built-out suburb with little vacant ground left for large subdivisions. New construction there has shifted toward condominiums, townhomes, and infill projects rather than the sprawling single-family developments still common in Apex or Holly Springs. Three projects currently moving through the town's approval pipeline show both sides of that shift happening at once.
- This spring, Kane Realty proposed a 213-unit, seven-story mixed-use building called Flatiron at 602 W. Chatham St. and 523 Old Apex Road in downtown Cary, directly across from Vicious Fishes and South Line breweries, with roughly 5,659 square feet of ground-floor retail. Site plans were filed with the town and are subject to multi-department review before permits can be issued.
- The same developer, partnering with Highwoods Properties, proposed converting a 1998 office building at 7001 Weston Parkway into a 275-unit apartment community, with about 5 percent of units held at 80 percent of area median income for at least 30 years. Cary's Planning and Zoning Board found the plan consistent with the town's comprehensive plan and recommended it advance.
- On the opposite edge of town, developer David Ferrell secured rezoning and annexation approval back in 2024 for 140 single-family homes on a 103-acre site in west Cary, one of the last parcels of that size still available inside town limits, with construction slated to begin this year.
You can track every active case yourself on the Town of Cary's rezoning docket. Two of these three projects add density in the form of apartments and mixed-use buildings, not owner-occupied houses. The third is notable precisely because large single-family sites like it are becoming rare inside Cary. That's the structural reason the citywide median is getting noisier: the town is adding housing stock in two very different shapes at the same time, and every month's closing data reflects a slightly different blend of the two.
What this means if you're comparing Cary to Apex or Morrisville
If you're weighing Cary against its neighbors on price alone, price per square foot is the more honest yardstick, because it survives the mix shift that's currently scrambling Cary's median. On that measure, Cary runs around $261 to $264 per square foot as of mid-2026. Apex, over the same three-month window ending June 2026, sold at a median of $622,000 and roughly $244 per square foot, with homes taking about 32 days to sell compared to Cary's 16 to 17. Morrisville's reported medians land meaningfully lower, commonly cited in the mid-$400,000s, but that comes with smaller lots and a noticeably thinner pool of active listings than Cary or Apex offer.
There's a second variable worth weighing alongside price: Cary's municipal tax rate sits at $0.3400 per $100 of assessed value, lower than Apex's $0.3560. On a $600,000 home, that difference is modest in isolation, but it compounds with the shorter average market time and tighter days-on-market pattern Cary has shown all year.
Morrisville carries its own wildcard. Apple's $552 million East Coast Hub campus at Research Triangle Park sits on the Wake County side of Morrisville. The company paused construction in 2024, then filed a commercial use application for a 324,000-square-foot office building on the site in late 2025, putting the project on a revised timeline rather than its original 2021 schedule. For a buyer deciding between Morrisville's lower entry price and Cary's tighter market, that project's pace is a real input, not a footnote. A campus that starts hiring on-site changes local housing demand in ways a paused one doesn't.
Why the neighborhood number beats the citywide one every time
Cary's price range by neighborhood is wide enough that a single town-wide median was never going to describe any specific street well. Established neighborhoods like Preston, MacGregor Downs, Lochmere, and Carpenter Village carry distinct price bands shaped by lot size, school zone, and age of housing stock, while newer construction corridors in west Cary and around Weatherstone sit in a different tier entirely. Downtown Cary condos, the segment growing fastest right now because of projects like Flatiron, occupy yet another band again.
That spread is exactly why the current confusion over Cary's citywide median matters less than it seems to. If you're shopping for a single-family resale in an established neighborhood, the 8.5 percent headline drop reported for July likely has little to do with what you'll actually pay, because that number is being pulled down by activity in a different part of the market entirely. The price-per-square-foot trend in your specific neighborhood, compared over the same stretch of months, tells you far more than any citywide figure pulled from a portal's homepage.
A couple of questions worth settling before you shop
Why do Zillow, Redfin, and MLS-sourced reports disagree so much on the same city? They pull from different data windows, weight closed sales differently, and in Cary's case right now, they're catching a market where the underlying mix of what's selling, single-family versus condo versus townhome, is shifting month to month. None of the sources is fabricating numbers. They're measuring a moving target from slightly different angles.
Should I wait for Cary's median price to drop further before buying? The median figure that's falling isn't a reliable predictor of what an individual home will sell for, because it's tracking a change in what's transacting rather than a broad decline in value. Price per square foot, which moved only 1 to 3 percent depending on the source, is the steadier signal, and it hasn't shown the kind of drop that would suggest waiting pays off in a specific neighborhood.
If you're trying to figure out what a specific Cary neighborhood, or a specific home, is actually worth against Apex or Morrisville right now, a citywide average isn't going to get you there. The Property Shop Real Estate Co. works these Wake County submarkets street by street, and we're glad to run a free home valuation that accounts for what's really selling near you, not just what a portal's homepage says about the town.
