Pull up recent sales in Troy, Texas and one number stands out immediately: the price per square foot is lower here than in Temple or Belton, the two cities that sandwich it along I-35. A three-month sales window ending in June 2026 put Troy's median sale price at $219,000, working out to about $152 a square foot. Temple, over the trailing twelve months, closed at roughly $158 to $165 a foot depending on which MLS pull you look at. Belton, even after a recent correction, still closed near $175.
On paper, Troy looks like the deal. Scroll a little further and you'll notice something else: those Troy homes took a median of 138 days to sell, and one broader pull from August 2026 put that number closer to 205 days. Temple, over the same period, was moving homes in something like ten weeks to three months depending on price tier. That gap is the real story. The cheap square footage is real. So is the wait.
Two Numbers for One Zip Code
Anyone comparing Troy listings side by side will notice the math doesn't quite line up. One dataset pulled in June 2026 showed Troy homes actually closing at a median of $219,000, or $152 a foot. A separate pull two months later, in August 2026, showed homes listed to buy at a median of $315,000, or $171 a foot.
That's not a typo and it's not two different towns. It's what happens in a market this small. Only 18 homes sold in Troy in June 2026, down from 24 the year before. When your entire monthly sample is 18 transactions, one custom build on a few acres can pull the average sharply upward, while three modest resales near town pull it back down. Temple, by contrast, had 815 active listings and 1,481 closings over a full trailing year as of a July 2026 MLS pull. A dataset that size smooths itself out. Troy's doesn't.
The practical read for a buyer: the listing price you see is not a reliable guide to what the house will actually sell for. Ask what similar square footage has closed at recently, not what's currently asking, and expect the answer to move around more than it would in a bigger zip code.
| Median sold price | Price per sq ft | Typical days on market | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Troy | $219K (3 mo. ending June 2026) | ~$152 | 138–205 days |
| Temple | ~$274,315 (trailing 12 mo., July 2026 MLS pull) | ~$158–165 | ~70–110 days |
| Belton | $310K most recent quarter, down from a $330K 2-year median | ~$175 | not separately reported |
Why So Few Sales Move the Whole Average
Troy has never been a large town. The Texas State Historical Association's own account of the city puts its population at 1,378 as of the 2000 Census, after growing from 275 residents at incorporation in 1960 to a peak of 1,581 in 1988. That's the underlying reason the sales numbers swing the way they do. A town this size doesn't produce a steady, high-volume market the way Temple or even Belton does. It produces a handful of closings a month, and each one carries outsized weight in the median.
This cuts two ways depending on which side of the transaction you're on. A buyer patient enough to wait out a slow-moving listing has real negotiating room, because a seller in a thin market can't count on a second offer showing up next week. A seller, on the other hand, needs to price against what has actually closed nearby, not against the one high-end acreage sale that happened to skew the zip code's average upward. Pricing off the wrong comp in Troy doesn't just cost a few days. Given the town's own days-on-market numbers, it can cost months.
The Tax Line Worth Reading Twice
Property tax is where the Troy math gets genuinely interesting, and it's easy to misread if you only glance at the headline rate. The City of Troy's own 2025-2026 budget notice sets the proposed tax rate at the voter-approval rate of 0.4422, which is actually lower than the prior year's rate of 0.4484. Read only that sentence and it sounds like a tax cut.
It isn't, at least not in the way most buyers assume. The city's own notice states plainly that this is still considered a tax increase, because it raises more revenue than the previous year. That's not a contradiction. It's how Texas truth-in-taxation law works: a lower rate applied to higher property valuations can still produce a bigger total bill. Rising home values in Bell County mean the rate can drop while the check a homeowner writes goes up.
Set that against Temple and Belton, where combined city, county, hospital district, and school district rates commonly land in the 2 percent to 2.4 percent range depending on which jurisdictions overlap a given address. Troy sits outside both incorporated cities' higher overlap zones, which typically means a lower blended rate on the tax side even before you account for the lower purchase price. That's a real advantage. It's just not automatic, and it's not fixed. Anyone comparing total monthly cost across Troy, Temple, and Belton needs the actual parcel-level rate, not the town's advertised one.
This is also a town where infrastructure moves at its own pace. The splash pad at Trojan Park just came back online after sitting unused for several years, and the city started culvert and bridge repairs on September 21, 2026, work that's still underway as of this writing. None of that is a red flag. It's simply what a small municipal budget looks like when it has to prioritize one project at a time, and it's a useful reminder that Troy runs on a different clock than its bigger neighbors, on the civic side and the real estate side alike.
What This Means If You're Weighing Troy Against Temple or Belton
If the number that drew you to Troy is the price per square foot, that number holds up. It's genuinely lower than Temple's and meaningfully lower than Belton's, even after Belton's recent quarterly pullback. What that number doesn't include is the time cost. A buyer who needs to close in sixty days and move on a fixed timeline is working against a market where the median listing sits for well over four months. A buyer with flexibility, particularly one looking for acreage or a quieter address just outside a bigger city's tax reach, is working with real leverage.
For sellers, the lesson runs the other direction. A Troy listing priced against the town's higher list-price average, rather than against what has actually closed in the last few months, risks joining the pile of homes sitting past the 150-day mark. Pricing tight to recent closed comps, not recent asking prices, is the difference between a normal Troy sale and a long one.
Is Troy cheaper than Temple to buy in right now? On a per-square-foot basis, yes. Recent data puts Troy around $152 a foot against Temple's $158 to $165. The gap narrows once you factor in that Troy's own asking prices can run well above what actually closes, given how few sales set the town's average each month.
Why do Troy home listings sometimes show two very different prices? Because the sample size is small. With as few as 18 sales in a single month, one higher-end acreage closing can pull the average sharply upward while the bulk of ordinary resales stay much lower. Always ask for recent closed comps rather than relying on the headline average.
Does a lower published tax rate in Troy mean a lower tax bill? Not necessarily. The city's own 2025-2026 budget notice sets a lower rate than the year before, but states outright that it still counts as a revenue increase because rising valuations offset the rate cut. A lower rate and a lower bill are two different things.
Troy rewards patience more than almost anywhere else in this corridor, on price and on timeline both. If you're trying to figure out what a specific property here is actually worth, based on what has closed nearby rather than what's currently listed, that's exactly the kind of comp pull Christie Minalga runs for buyers and sellers across the Temple-Belton-Troy corridor. Get your free home valuation and see the real numbers behind the listing price.
