Selling a House in Plano, TX: What Your 90s House Is Really Worth (2026)

Your Plano house isn't being compared to your neighbor's. It's being compared to a new build in Frisco.

That is the single most useful thing I can tell a Plano seller, and it is the thing most pricing conversations here skip. Buyers shopping your house are not only looking at Plano. They have tabs open on communities a few miles north where everything is new, and they are doing arithmetic on the difference whether or not anyone mentions it.

The good news is that the arithmetic is more in your favour than it looks. Here is what your house is actually worth, and why.

What You Actually Own

Plano is built out. There is very little new construction left, which means the city is a resale market and most of what sells here was built in the 1980s and 1990s. If your house is from that era, you are not the exception - you are the market.

The citywide median sale price is about $520K(Redfin, three months ending May 2026). Treat that number as trivia. Plano runs from 1970s ranch streets in the east to Legacy West's towers in the west, and a median that blends those tells you nothing about your street. What it does tell you is the shape of the buyer pool: this is a city of people buying established houses, and 56.8% of homes here are owner-occupied (ACS 2024). These are not investors flipping. They are families deciding where to spend the next decade, and they are picky.

What It's Competing Against

Here are the two numbers that should shape your pricing conversation.

Look at the middle row. Frisco's median is roughly $168,000 higher, but per square foot the two cities are five dollars apart. That is the market telling you, plainly, that it values Plano land and Frisco land almost identically.

So the gap is not a verdict on your address. It is buyers paying for newer and bigger. Which reframes your whole sale: you are not discounted because you're in Plano. You're discounted for age and condition - and unlike your address, condition is something you can act on between now and listing.

Why Condition Is the Whole Game Here

In a market of new houses, condition is a given and buyers compete on location and lot. In Plano, condition is the variable. Two houses on the same street, same square footage, same schools, can be tens of thousands apart purely on whether someone has touched the kitchen since the Clinton administration.

The reason is the buyer's mental math. They are standing in your 1993 kitchen thinking “$60,000 and six months of my life” - and they are almost always over-estimating, because the unknown is scarier than a quote. That over-estimate comes straight off your price, and it is bigger than the renovation would have cost you.

This is why the dated house that shows immaculately still beats the half-updated house that doesn't. You are not just selling finishes. You are selling the absence of a project.

Which Updates Move a Plano Number

The reliable ones are cheap and unglamorous, and they are the same ones I'd tell any North Texas seller - the full list is in the North Texas seller's playbook. What's specific to Plano is the weighting.

• Paint, deep clean, landscaping, minor repairs, HVAC service. Always worth it, everywhere, and doubly so on a house whose age is already the buyer's objection. This is where you spend first.
• Kitchens and bathrooms are where Plano homes win or lose - because they are where the 1990s is most visible. That does not mean gut them. Cabinet paint, hardware, lighting, and counters land far better per dollar than a full remodel, and a full remodel rarely returns its cost.
• Consider the credit instead. If the kitchen genuinely needs $50K, many buyers would rather have the allowance and choose their own finishes than pay you for taste they didn't pick. A credit also doesn't require you to live in a construction site to sell.
• Don't buy the roof or HVAC pre-emptively unless it's failing inspection. On a 30-year-old house those are negotiation items, not price-raisers.

Before committing to any of it, put the actual numbers in the renovation ROI calculator rather than trusting a contractor's optimism or a neighbour's story.

West, Central, East: Different Sales

Where you are in Plano changes not just your price but your strategy.

West Plano (Willow Bend, the Preston corridor, near Legacy) sells to buyers with the budget to be fussy and the option to buy new instead. Presentation matters most here, and so does pricing discipline - this buyer knows exactly what else their money buys.

Central Plano is the mature-lot, mature-tree market. Your advantage is the thing Frisco structurally cannot sell: a street that already looks the way it will look in twenty years. Lead with it.

East Plano is the most accessible entry point in the city and it is Plano ISD, which is a genuinely strong pitch to a first-time buyer being priced out everywhere else. Your buyer here is often stretching, which makes your condition and your willingness to help with closing costs matter more than another $5K of asking price.

Downtown Planosells on something no other part of the city has: walkability and a DART station. If you're there, you are not selling a house, you are selling not needing to drive - and the buyer who wants that will pay for it.

What You'd Actually Net

Sale price is not what you keep. Plan on roughly 8-10% of the sale pricein total selling costs: commissions (typically 5-6%, though structures vary post-NAR settlement), about 1% in title and closing costs since the seller pays the owner's title policy in Texas, $500-$5,000 in pre-listing prep, and prorated property taxes through closing. On a $520K house that is roughly $42K-$52K before your mortgage payoff.

Run that before you list. The most avoidable bad moment in a sale is a seller discovering their net at the closing table, because by then every decision that could have changed it is behind them.