"We were packed in there like sardines." That's how Fareway president Garrett Piklapp described the grocery chain's old offices in Boone, the cramped space the company outgrew before moving more than 140 headquarters employees into a renovated building on Johnston's northwest side in the fall of 2024. It's the kind of local detail that explains why a city keeps building new subdivisions even when the headline numbers about that same city's housing market read like a slowdown.
Because right now, depending on which site you check, Johnston's home prices are either falling, barely moving, or climbing double digits. All three claims come from real data collected in 2026. None of them are wrong. They're just measuring different things, and if you're comparing Johnston to other Des Moines suburbs while trying to figure out what your money actually buys here, that distinction matters more than any single number on the page.
Three Trackers, Three Different Johnston Markets
Pull up three widely used housing data sites and you'll get three different stories about the same city in the same year.
| Source | Time Window | What It Measures | The Number |
|---|---|---|---|
| Redfin | March 2026 | Median sale price | $386,000, down 7.5% year over year |
| Redfin | March 2026 | Days on market | 29 days, down from 126 a year earlier |
| Movoto | July 2026 | Median list price | $425,000, down 2% year over year |
| Movoto | July 2026 | Price per square foot | $235, down 3% year over year |
| Zillow | mid-2026 | Home Value Index (typical value) | $337,265, up 12.0% year over year |
Read across that table and the contradiction jumps out immediately. Sale prices and list prices are both down. The Zillow index, which tracks estimated value for the same types of homes over time rather than whatever happened to close that month, is up 12 percent. Days on market cratered. Sales volume in March 2026 hit 26 closings, up from 19 the year before, according to Redfin's own count.
A market that's cooling doesn't usually sell homes four times faster while volume climbs. Something else is going on, and it has less to do with buyers losing interest in Johnston and more to do with what kind of house is actually closing each month.
The New Homes Doing the Pulling
In November 2022, the Johnston City Council approved a final plat from Hubbell Land Development for 43.82 acres north of Little Beaver Creek, carved into 71 lots for single-family homes. That approval became Crosshaven, a conservation-focused community that Hubbell Homes markets around green space and roughly three miles of on-site trails.
Crosshaven isn't a luxury build-out. D.R. Horton's homes there have listed with quick move-in pricing starting around $330,990, and the floor plans run between 1,277 and 1,661 square feet. That's meaningfully smaller than the established single-family stock that's defined Johnston for the past two decades.
Zoom out and the pattern holds across the city. New-home marketplace listings for Johnston show prices spanning from $224,990 up to $9.6 million, with square footage ranging from 1,166 to 3,585 across roughly 14 active builders. That's an enormous spread, and it means the entry-level end of new construction has genuinely gotten smaller and cheaper at the same time the custom end has gotten more expensive.
Here's the mechanical part that most headline stats skip: a median sale price is calculated from whatever actually closed that month, not from a fixed basket of comparable homes. If a bigger share of March 2026's 26 closings were compact starter builds like Crosshaven's Hamilton plan than the mix that closed in March 2025, the median can drop even though not one individual home lost value. That's exactly what Zillow's appreciation index is picking up and what Redfin's closed-sale median is missing.
What the Established Inventory Still Commands
The homes that would tell you if Johnston's existing stock is actually softening aren't the ones driving the median down. In Ridgedale Heights, Destiny Homes has been building the Hansbury plan, a two-story layout with more than 2,100 square feet of finished space, four bedrooms, 2.5 baths, and a three-car garage. Resale listings in the established Green Meadows North neighborhood have included five-bedroom, four-bath homes well above the city's reported median. Custom builds near Saylorville Lake, including walk-out ranches backing to Camp Dodge, have listed into the high six and seven figures.
None of that reads like a market where existing homeowners are watching equity evaporate. It reads like a market where a wave of smaller, cheaper new construction is closing in volume at the same time the established segment keeps trading at its own, separate price tier. Averaging those two very different products into a single "median home price" produces a number that describes neither one accurately.
The Employer Behind the Faster Clock
The Fareway move is worth understanding in more detail because it's a concrete demand signal, not a vague sense that Johnston is "growing." The company bought the former Iowa Bankers Association building at 8800 NW 62nd Avenue for $3.65 million in 2023 and put roughly $5 million into renovations before consolidating its administrative staff there. Before the move, two-thirds of those employees already lived in Story or Polk County, which means this wasn't a sudden influx of new residents so much as a concentration of higher-wage headquarters jobs into a building that now anchors more than 140 people in Johnston full time, with room to grow.
That kind of anchor tenant doesn't move the median price by itself, but it helps explain why Redfin's days-on-market figure for March 2026 dropped so sharply and why sales volume climbed even as the price tag on the "typical" closing looked lower. Buyers were competing hard for what was available. They just weren't all competing for the same size of house, which is exactly the condition that produces a falling median alongside a rising value index.
Reading Your Own Comps Instead of the Headline
If you're weighing Johnston against another Des Moines suburb, or trying to price a home here, the city-wide median is close to useless on its own. A few adjustments make it usable:
- Match square footage and vintage before you trust a comp. A Crosshaven quick move-in and a Green Meadows North resale are not competing for the same buyer, even though both closings feed the same median.
- Separate new construction from resale in your own research. Ask any data source, or your agent, to filter by build year. The gap between a $330,990 starter build and a $1 million-plus custom home near Saylorville Lake is the entire story.
- Track days on market for homes your size, not the citywide average. A 29-day median across all of Johnston tells you less than knowing how fast four-bedroom resales in Ridgedale Heights or Green Meadows North have actually been moving.
- Check what the same source said twelve months ago before reacting to one month's number. Redfin, Movoto, and Zillow each calculate differently, and a single month's swing in any one of them says more about that month's closing mix than about the direction of the market.
A Few Direct Questions
Is now a good time to sell an established home in Johnston? The segment pulling the median down is new, smaller construction, not resale inventory in neighborhoods like Green Meadows North or Ridgedale Heights. If your home matches that established profile, the falling city-wide median isn't describing your situation.
Why did homes sell so much faster in March 2026 than a year earlier? Redfin recorded a drop from 126 days on market to 29 days alongside higher sales volume, which points to strong buyer demand meeting a broader mix of available inventory, including the smaller new-construction product coming out of communities like Crosshaven.
Does new construction always drag the median down? Only when the new homes closing are smaller or cheaper than the existing resale stock, which is currently the case with Johnston's entry-level builds. In a market where new construction skews larger or more expensive than resale, the effect runs the other direction.
If you're trying to figure out what your specific home, in your specific corner of Johnston, is actually worth right now, the citywide number is a starting point at best. Tim Lucken REAL can pull comps sized to your home's square footage, vintage, and neighborhood instead of the blended average, and walk you through what that means for pricing, timing, and next steps. Schedule your free Market-Ready Consultation to get numbers built around your house, not the headline.
