Urbandale's Median Home Price Is Averaging Two Completely Different Bets

"There are people in the community that didn't know Urbandale had a downtown." That's Aaron DeJong, the city's director of economic development, describing the problem his team is trying to solve at 70th and Douglas. It's also, without meaning to, the best one-sentence explanation of why the Urbandale housing market is so confusing to compare on paper right now.

If you've pulled up Urbandale's median home price this summer, you've probably seen three different numbers depending on where you looked. Redfin has the median sale price at $385,000 as of December 2025, up 10 percent year over year, with homes selling in 58 days compared to 84 the year before. Zillow puts the average home value at $356,126 as of June 2026, up a much smaller 1.6 percent. Homes.com, looking at the trailing 12 months through around mid-2026, lands at $348,842, up 3 percent.

None of these sources are wrong. They're measuring different mixes of homes sold in different windows, and that instability is itself the story. Urbandale isn't one housing market wearing a single median price. It's two markets, running on two different economic logics, getting averaged into a number that tells you almost nothing about which one you're actually shopping in.

The core the city is betting public money on

Drive the length of Douglas Avenue between Merle Hay Road and 75th Street and you're looking at what city planners now call downtown Urbandale, even though, as DeJong pointed out, plenty of longtime residents wouldn't have called it that a few years ago. The Urbandale City Council approved a 20-year Downtown Master Plan on June 17, 2025, built around two specific redevelopment nodes: 70th and Douglas, and 67th and Douglas.

This isn't a plan sitting in a drawer. The city hired the consulting firm Bolten and Menk to design it, awarded a rezoning contract to Wright Smith Cozino working alongside the Confluence firm, and brought on De Novo Marketing out of Cedar Rapids in February 2026 to figure out how to brand the district for the metro. The zoning that exists today along that stretch is neighborhood commercial, built for low-density retail. The city is actively rewriting it to allow the multi-story, mixed-use buildings the master plan calls for.

"There's going to be major changes down there," DeJong said. "How should that be reintroduced to the metro? The branding effort is to identify what is downtown Urbandale to be communicated as out to everyone."

You can already see the first pieces landing. The former Econo Lodge at 10841 Douglas Ave is becoming The Enclave Apartments, a four-story, roughly 50-unit affordable development from Volker Development, with units leasing at 50 and 40 percent of area median income and a total project cost near $17.5 million. Last October, the city turned an empty parking lot into a pop-up park for an afternoon. More than 700 people showed up for food, music, and a preview of what the corridor could become, according to Clint Dudley, owner of Shade Tree Auto, who opened his shop in downtown Urbandale in 2022 and joined the Downtown Urbandale Stakeholders Group in 2024.

None of this changes the physical bones of the older homes near that corridor. What it changes is the demand curve around them. A block of parcels near 70th and Douglas is fixed. The city can't create more of it. When public dollars start flowing into streets, utilities, and rezoning around a fixed set of lots, the ceiling on what those specific homes are worth can move in a way that has nothing to do with square footage or finishes.

The edge where land keeps the ceiling low

Drive the opposite direction, toward the city's western and northwestern reaches, and the economics flip. City Manager David Jones has been blunt about why: Urbandale has roughly 14,000 acres of infill sites still within city limits, room to expand substantially to the west, and ongoing opportunities to annex contiguous land, including areas near the Urban Loop, with more potential expansion into Dallas County.

That's not abstract. Builders are acting on it right now. KRM Custom Homes is actively selling lots in developments including Bentley Ridge in northwestern Urbandale, Biltmore Proper along Meredith Drive, a second plat at Biltmore West, and Bent Tree Crossing near a 10-acre pond and several elementary schools. Near the I-35/80 interchange, The Loop, a Caliber Development project with nearly 250 apartment and townhome units on more than 10 acres just east of Home Depot, broke ground in 2025. Jones has also pointed to accessory dwelling units and zero-entry housing as tools the city is leaning on to add supply without waiting on greenfield land, specifically to help people age in place.

This is the mechanism that keeps west-side new construction from running away in price the way a supply-constrained corridor can. When a builder can always open another plat, buyer demand gets absorbed by more lots rather than higher prices per lot. It's not that west Urbandale is a bad bet. It's that the bet is different: you're buying certainty and a finished product today, not scarcity-driven upside tomorrow.

Why the same city can post rising and flat prices at once

The city's own permitting data shows both halves of this story happening simultaneously. Urbandale issued 1,552 building permits in 2025, the most on record, totaling $269.3 million in permitted valuation. That included 646 total dwelling units: 311 single-family detached homes, 120 townhome units, and 215 multi-family units, the third-highest year on record for total units and one of the strongest multi-family years the city has tracked. Commercial, retail, and restaurant investment added another roughly $50 million in permitted valuation on top of that. City Manager Jones called it an exceptionally strong year across multiple sectors, noting Urbandale recorded the highest number of housing units built since 2004.

That's a supply response happening on both ends of the city at once, but for different reasons. Out west, supply is answering demand the way it's supposed to, which is why price growth there looks more moderate. Downtown, the "supply" being added is public infrastructure and upzoning around a fixed footprint, which is why that submarket can absorb demand into price rather than into new inventory. Average those two dynamics into a single citywide median and you get exactly the kind of contradictory numbers Redfin, Zillow, and Homes.com are all showing right now. None of them are measuring the same mix of homes, because the mix itself is shifting under the surface.

What this means if you're touring homes this month

If you're comparing two Urbandale listings at a similar price, ask which submarket each one actually sits in before you compare them as if they're the same product.

1. Is this parcel fixed or replaceable? A home within a few blocks of the Douglas Avenue nodes is sitting on land the city can't manufacture more of. A home in a west-side subdivision is one of many similar lots a builder can keep adding.
2. Is there a public investment attached to this address, and on what timeline? Rezoning, streetscape work, and branding take years to fully show up in resale value. Buying early into a corridor means living through some construction and uncertainty before you see the upside, if it materializes at all.
3. What's actually driving the days-on-market number you're seeing? A 58-day average tells you something different in a market where scarcity is pushing multiple offers than it does in a market where builders are simply keeping pace with demand.

None of this means one Urbandale is smarter to buy into than the other. It means the median price you saw on a portal isn't a fair way to compare them.

A couple of things people ask

Is downtown Urbandale actually walkable yet, or is this all still on paper? Some of it is real today, like the pop-up park events and businesses such as Shade Tree Auto that are already operating along the corridor. Most of the physical transformation, the rezoning, the streetscape work, the new construction, is still in progress. The master plan is a 20-year document, not a next-quarter one.

Will the west side keep adding lots as fast as demand shows up? Based on what the city has said about its 14,000 acres of infill land and its room to annex toward Dallas County, that appears to be the plan. That's exactly why buyers there should expect steadier, more incremental price movement rather than the kind of run-up you'd see in a supply-constrained pocket of the city.

Urbandale's median price is a real number, but it's describing an average of two different bets, not one market. If you're trying to figure out which side of that split actually fits what you're looking for, and what you can expect from it a few years down the road, I'd rather walk you through the specific block than the citywide number. Reach out to Laura Major and let's connect.