Search for Troy's median home price this month and the internet will hand you three different answers. One source says $400,000. Another puts it at $459,000. A third, quoting mid-2026 figures, lands at $489,900. These aren't old numbers competing with new ones. They're all describing the same weeks in the same city.
That spread isn't a data error. It's the most honest thing any of these sites will tell you about Troy, even though none of them say it directly: there is no single Troy housing market. There are at least three, sitting inside the same city limits, and the gap between them is wide enough to change which house you can afford by six figures depending on which zip code you're actually shopping in.
Why the Same City Keeps Producing Different Numbers
Start with the cleanest evidence, because it comes from one source measuring itself. Redfin's data through the three months ending June 2026 shows Troy's median sale price at $459,000, down slightly compared to the same period a year earlier. In the very same window, the median price per square foot rose 6.7 percent. A city's overall price cannot fall while its per-square-foot value climbs unless something changed about what's actually selling. The most likely explanation: smaller or more modestly finished homes made up a bigger share of June's closings than they did the year before, pulling the median down even as the underlying value of the housing stock kept rising.
That's the mechanism behind every conflicting headline you'll find about Troy this year. A citywide median is a snapshot of whatever happened to close that month, not a stable measurement of value. Change the mix of what sold, and the number moves, even if nothing about the market's actual direction has changed at all.
Once you accept that the citywide figure is a moving target, the more useful question stops being "what is Troy's median price" and becomes "which part of Troy am I actually looking at."
Three Closed Sales, Three Different Troys, Same Week
Nothing makes the split clearer than looking at what actually closed in Troy over a single week this month.
On August 13, a three-bedroom, 1.5-bath home at 3175 Camden Drive in zip code 48084 sold for $412,500. The same day, a three-bedroom, 2.5-bath home nearly 700 square feet larger, at 6229 Sandshores Drive in zip code 48085, closed for $395,000. One day earlier, on August 12, a home on Basswood Drive in zip code 48098, listed at $635,000, sold for roughly 8 percent over asking after just 19 days on the market, putting the closing price near $686,000.
Three sales, three zip codes, one week in August. The spread between the cheapest and the most expensive isn't a fluke of one unusual listing. Zip code 48098 is one of Troy's oldest and most established residential areas, built out mostly in the 1960s and 1970s, home to Troy High School, and split between the Troy and Avondale school district boundaries. Zip codes 48084 and 48085 are separate residential pockets elsewhere in the city, with their own housing stock and their own pace of turnover.
Realtytrac's tracking of recently sold homes in 48098 puts the zip's median sale price at $560,022, a figure pulled up by exactly the kind of transaction the Basswood sale represents. Zillow's current estimate for homes for sale in 48084 sits at $424,992, in the same neighborhood as what the Camden Drive sale actually closed for. Line those numbers up next to each other and the citywide median starts to look less like a description of Troy and more like an average of two different cities that happen to share a name.
The Gap Is About to Widen, Not Close
Here's the part that matters for anyone comparing neighborhoods right now instead of using a five-year-old snapshot: the forces behind this split aren't evenly distributed across the city, and nothing currently underway points toward the zip codes converging.
Along Big Beaver Road, the Forbes Company is redeveloping the 40-acre site that once housed Kmart's corporate headquarters, directly across from Somerset Collection. The project, known as Somerset West, includes a University of Michigan Health facility that Michigan Medicine CEO Marschall Runge has described as the start of a broader U-M Health presence in southeast Michigan, along with office space, retail, and eventually residential units. The design phase, handled by Ann Arbor's Hobbs + Black Architects, was budgeted at $11.24 million, with the full complex expected to open in 2027. A few miles down the same corridor, Bacall Companies has been converting the former Drury Inn into a dual-branded property, a 154-room Hotel Indigo alongside a 63-room EVEN Hotel, and has separately pursued an eight-story hotel-and-apartment project nearby, with groundbreaking anticipated for spring 2026 and occupancy targeted for later this year.
That's a significant concentration of new investment landing along one commercial corridor, not spread evenly across Troy's residential neighborhoods. Big Beaver itself was once envisioned as an office-park "edge city," and it's been rezoned under a form-based code dating back to a 2006 corridor study to allow exactly this kind of apartment and hotel infill.
At the same time, the city is separately rezoning other parts of Troy. A new North Troy Zoning District and revisions to the Neighborhood Node ordinance, aimed at replacing legacy office and industrial zoning with mixed-use standards and what planners call missing-middle housing, moved through public hearings earlier this year. That's a second, distinct wave of change, arriving in a different part of the city on its own timeline.
None of this is neutral for a buyer trying to compare "Troy" to another Oakland County suburb using one number. Different corridors are absorbing different kinds of new housing and investment at different speeds. The spread you see in this August's closed sales is not a snapshot of where things landed. It's a snapshot of a market still being built, corridor by corridor.
What This Means If You're Actually Comparing Neighborhoods
If you're using Troy's median price to decide whether the city fits your budget, the number by itself won't tell you much. What will help:
Ask which zip code a listing sits in before you compare it to anything you've seen quoted for "Troy." A home in 48098 and a home in 48085 are answering two different questions about affordability, even when both carry a Troy mailing address.
Look at price per square foot alongside the sale price, not instead of it. Redfin's June 2026 figures show Troy's per-square-foot value climbing even in a month when the median dipped, which tells you more about where values are actually heading than the median alone.
If new construction or conversion is part of what you're weighing, ask where it's happening. A missing-middle unit built under Troy's new North Troy zoning framework is going to price and appraise differently than an established single-family home in one of the city's older, mid-century pockets.
This is the kind of comparison that gets lost when a portal hands you a single citywide figure and calls it a day. It's also the kind of work that's worth having someone local walk through with you, zip by zip, before you commit to a number that may not describe the street you're actually considering.
A Few Questions Worth Asking Directly
Why do real estate sites disagree so much on Troy's median price? Each site pulls from different time windows, different definitions of median (asking price versus closed price), and different snapshots of what happened to sell that month. None of them are wrong. They're measuring a market that includes at least three distinct price tiers, so small shifts in which homes closed can move the citywide number without reflecting any real change in value.
Is Troy's housing market cooling in 2026? The signals point in different directions depending on what you measure. Median sale price has ticked down slightly year over year in some recent windows, but price per square foot is up, homes are still selling in about two weeks, and new institutional investment is still landing in the city. That's a market shifting in composition more than one losing momentum.
Does the zip code I buy in affect resale later? It's reasonable to expect that new development patterns, like the residential density arriving under Troy's rezoning versus the anchor investment at Somerset West, will keep shaping how each zip code performs relative to the others. That's exactly the kind of local trend worth tracking with someone who follows the city closely, rather than guessing from a single citywide average.
If you're trying to figure out what a specific Troy address is actually worth, or how it compares to a similar home in Birmingham, Bloomfield Township, or Royal Oak, that's a conversation better had with real comps than with a portal's monthly average. Kathy Parker works these Oakland County markets street by street, and would be glad to walk through what your target zip code is really doing right now. Let's Connect.
