A buyer relocating for a Research Triangle Park job pulls up four towns on a spreadsheet: Cary, Apex, Holly Springs, Morrisville. Three of the four medians cluster within about $30,000 of each other. The fourth, Morrisville, sits nearly $100,000 lower. The easy read is that Morrisville is the value play, the town everyone else overlooked. The harder and more useful read is that the number doesn't mean what it appears to mean, and treating it as a straight location discount can cost a buyer or seller real money at the comp stage.
This matters most for the exact household doing that spreadsheet exercise: someone comparing Triangle suburbs by employer proximity, weighing a detached house against a townhome, and using a town-wide median as a stand-in for what a specific property should cost.
The Four Medians, Side by Side
For the three months ending August 2026, median sale prices across the corridor looked like this:
| Town | Median Sale Price (3 mo. ending Aug 2026) |
|---|---|
| Cary | $645,073 |
| Holly Springs | $629,084 |
| Apex | $614,593 |
| Morrisville | $549,636 |
Those figures come from Redfin's local market data. Read at face value, Morrisville trails the pack by a wide margin, and Holly Springs, despite being the smallest of the four towns by population, is nearly tied with Cary. Both of those facts deserve a second look before anyone builds a moving decision around them.
Why Morrisville's Number Doesn't Mean What It Looks Like
Morrisville's median blends two very different housing markets that happen to share a zip code. Condominiums in town have been pricing around $270,000, while detached single-family homes have been averaging closer to $716,000. That is not a modest spread. It is two separate products getting flattened into one town-wide figure.
Morrisville has a denser concentration of condo and townhome inventory than Cary or Apex, built up around communities like Preston Creekside, Keystone Park, Breckenridge, and newer construction such as McKee Homes' Page Townes development. Walk through active listings in any of those communities and you will find end-unit townhomes with two-car garages sitting a few blocks from detached homes on wooded lots backing up to protected buffers. Both count toward the same median.
Cary and Apex, by contrast, carry a housing stock that skews more heavily toward detached single-family product, particularly in established neighborhoods built out through the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s in Cary and the newer western growth corridors in Apex. When a market's mix leans more detached, its composite median climbs, independent of whether any individual house is worth more.
The practical consequence: a buyer comparing a detached Morrisville home to a detached Cary home using the town-wide medians as a shortcut will be comparing the wrong things. The gap between those two specific houses is almost certainly smaller than $95,000. An agent pulling comps for a Morrisville listing needs to filter by property type first and location second, or the resulting number will be wrong in either direction depending on what's actually for sale nearby.
The Fujifilm Test
Holly Springs offers the mirror-image lesson. Fujifilm Biotechnologies has been building one of the largest cell culture biomanufacturing sites in North America there, with a total committed investment of $3.2 billion and a hiring path toward 1,400 jobs by 2031. The company celebrated the grand opening of its first phase in September 2025, and average pay for the positions has been reported around $109,000 to $110,000. Johnson & Johnson has since signed a 10-year, $2 billion deal to secure manufacturing space inside the same facility, with Regeneron also tied in through a separate supply agreement. On paper, that is the kind of employer news that should send home prices climbing.
It hasn't, at least not yet. Holly Springs' median sale price for the three months ending August 2026 was actually down 1.3 percent from the same period a year earlier. A marquee employer landing in town creates long-term demand support, not an automatic short-term price jump. The jobs arrive on a multi-year hiring curve stretching to 2031, and home prices respond to what's happening in the market this quarter, not to a company's decade-long buildout plan.
That doesn't mean the Fujifilm investment is irrelevant to a housing decision. It means the connection between corporate investment and home values runs on a longer timeline than most buyers assume, and a headline about billions in investment doesn't translate into an immediate premium on the house next door.
What This Means If You're Comparing the Four
If you are cross-shopping Cary, Apex, Holly Springs, and Morrisville, the town-wide median is a starting point, not a conclusion. A few questions do more work than the headline number:
- What's the property type mix in the specific neighborhood you're considering, not just the town average?
- Is the home you're comparing a detached house, a townhome, or a condo, and are you comparing it against the same product type in the other towns?
- For a town tied to a major employer announcement, what's the hiring timeline, and does it match your own time horizon for owning the home?
- What do days on market and sale-to-list ratios look like for that specific property type, since those numbers tend to hold steadier than median price when a market's mix shifts?
Morrisville's central position, close to RTP, Raleigh-Durham International Airport, and both Raleigh and Durham job centers, is a real advantage that a blended median obscures. Lake Crabtree County Park and its network of trails, the Hatcher Creek Greenway connecting to Morrisville Community Park, and quick access to shopping along routes near Park West Village are amenities that come with the town regardless of whether the home you buy is a detached house or a townhome. None of that shows up in a single median price.
A Few Direct Questions
Does Morrisville's lower median mean it's a less desirable location? Not based on what's driving the number. The gap traces largely to a higher share of condos and townhomes in the town's overall housing stock, not to weaker demand for detached homes there.
Should I expect Holly Springs home prices to jump because of the Fujifilm expansion? Not on a short timeline. The hiring plan runs through 2031, and the town's median sale price was down slightly year over year even as the facility opened its first phase and signed new tenants.
How should I compare prices across these four towns if the medians are misleading? Filter by property type before you filter by town. A detached home in Morrisville and a detached home in Cary are a fair comparison. A townhome in Morrisville and a detached home in Apex are not, even if they land in the same price range.
If you're weighing these towns against each other and want comps that actually match the property type and neighborhood you're considering, Avalon Realty Group can walk through the numbers with you street by street, not just town by town. Request Your Free Home Valuation to see how your specific home, or the one you're eyeing, actually compares.
