An entry hall with a console table under a tall mirror, light falling across a stone floor.

Barton Hills, and the building in the median

Sold in 1956 as the world’s largest air conditioned suburb, built above the springs it taught Austin to worry about, and currently described by statistics that belong to one address.

19 homes for sale in Barton Hillsas of October 16, 2026 at 7:15 AM CDT

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On the market

Barton Hills right now

Every residential listing whose location falls inside the Barton Hills planning area, in 78704. That is the boundary the City of Austin publishes, and the one this page uses. From Unlock MLS through MLS Grid as of October 16, 2026 at 7:15 AM CDT. Closed sale prices are not shown: Texas is a non-disclosure state, so every figure here comes from asking prices and days since listing.

For sale: 16
Median asking: $984,500
Median per sq ft: $577
Median days listed: 72

All 19 of them, newest first. Sort by price either way below. Everything across 78704, filters and all, is on its market page.

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Listed by Christies Intl Real Estate Lone Star; Compass RE Texas, LLC; DHS Realty; Douglas Elliman Real Estate; Give Realty, Inc; Hart of Texas; Heart Realty; Joseph Properties LLC; Keller Williams Realty; Kuper Sotheby's Int'l Realty; LPT Realty LLC - Ascend Group; Moreland Properties; Serhant Texas, LLC; eXp Realty, LLC.

Drag to pan, pinch or use the buttons to zoom. Hover a price for a preview and click it for the listing, or tap it on a touchscreen. Every one of these is also in the grid above.

1956

The world’s largest air conditioned subdivision

William Barton put a homestead near the springs in 1837 and named them for his daughters, Parthenia, Eliza and Zenobia. None of those names stuck to anything and his did, to the springs, the creek, the greenbelt and eventually to 535 acres of hillside above all of them.

The first houses went up in the 1940s. The subdivision proper started in 1956, platted in six sections by S.R. Sheppard, Builders Development Corporation and others: 1,585 lots, an estimated 53 million dollars, the largest centrally planned subdivision Austin had then seen, and shown off in that year’s Parade of Homes as the world’s largest air conditioned subdivision. That was the selling point. Building carried on through the 1970s and into the late 1990s, which is why the streets hold four decades of houses rather than one.

It taught Austinto worry aboutBarton Springs.

The water

The development that started the argument

Putting 1,585 lots on the hillside above Barton Creek, just upstream of the springs, did not go unremarked at the time. The City’s own Parks Director, Beverly Sheffield, and members of the Audubon Society objected that the development would threaten the flow of the springs and the quality of the water coming out of them. They were overruled and the subdivision was built.

That is among the earliest organized alarm about Barton Springs in Austin, and the line from it runs more or less unbroken to the Save Our Springs ordinance that voters passed in 1992, which the Zilker page sets out. The neighborhood that first made people worry about the springs now sits inside the recharge zone the ordinance governs, which is a live constraint on what any lot here can be built out to rather than a historical note.

A two-story residence at dusk, limestone and dark timber under a low roofline, its windows lit and live oaks overhead.

Counted

One address, most of the median

There are 19 residential listings inside the boundary as of October 16, 2026 at 7:15 AM CDT, 8 of them houses and 11 condominiums. 7 of them, which is 37% of the whole, are units at a single address: 3600 Lamar, finished in 2016. Here is every headline statistic for this neighborhood, with that one building and without it.

Headline statistics for Barton Hills with and without the one address that holds a third of the listings
Statistic	As published	Without 3600 Lamar
Listings	19	12
Median asking	$984,500	$1,399,000
Median per sq ft	$577	$735
Median year built	2016	1998
Median days listed	72	136

Removing one address moves the median asking price by 42% and the median year built by 18 years. Both columns are true. The left one is what gets published, and it is a reasonable description of inventory. It is not a description of the neighborhood’s housing, because a neighborhood platted in 1956 does not have a median year built in this century. One building does.

This is worth generalizing, because it is not special to Barton Hills. Any median over a few dozen listings can be captured by one development releasing units, and nothing on a portal tells you when that has happened. It is also why an automated valuation on a house here can drift: the comparable set it draws on is being fed by a building that has nothing in common with a ranch house up the hill.

Honestly

Who Barton Hills is wrong for

Anyone shopping on a portal median: The table below is the argument. A third of what is listed here is in one building, and taking it out moves the median asking price by most of its own value. Any figure you have seen for Barton Hills, from any site including the automated valuation on your own house, is carrying that building unless somebody deliberately removed it. Ask what the median is of before you use it, which is good practice everywhere and essential here.
A buyer looking for the middle of the market: There is not much of one. The condominiums sit in the three hundreds and four hundreds and the houses start around a million, with very little listed in between at any given time. That is a real structural feature rather than a quirk of the month, because the two products are genuinely different: units in newer buildings along the Lamar edge, and ranch houses on large lots up the hill. Decide which you are buying before you set a budget.
Someone who wants to build or add on without thinking about water: This is the Barton Springs Zone, and the ordinance that governs it exists in part because of this neighborhood. Impervious cover limits, water quality controls and the recharge rules are real constraints on what a lot can carry, and they bite hardest on exactly the projects that look most obvious: a big addition, a pool, a bigger driveway. Find out what your lot's limits are before you price the project, not after.
A buyer who wants the greenbelt and quiet: Those pull against each other here. The greenbelt access that makes this neighborhood is also why cars park along the streets nearest the trailheads on a good weekend, and the eastern edge sits on South Lamar with the traffic that implies. Both are very local and a few streets change the answer completely, so the visit that tells you anything is a Saturday afternoon rather than a weekday morning.

Nearby

The rest of 78704

Everything for sale across the ZIP, with filters, is on the 78704 market page.

Working here

Two questions that decide a purchase here

The first is impervious cover. This is the Barton Springs Zone, and what a lot can carry in roof, drive and patio is a hard number rather than a negotiation. It is also the single most common way a plan for a house here falls apart after closing, because the addition or the pool that seemed obvious turns out to be the thing the lot has no room left for. I pull the limit and what is already counted against it during the option period, before the number matters, and I would rather lose a deal there than have you find out with an architect.

The second is the comparables, and the table above is why. A third of what is currently listed in Barton Hills is in one building, so an automated valuation on a ranch house up the hill is being fed by units that have nothing in common with it. Pricing a house here, to buy or to sell, means pulling the comparable set by hand and throwing most of it out. That is slower than running a report and it is the difference between a number you can defend in a negotiation and one you cannot.

If that is the kind of help you want on a purchase or a sale here, start a conversation.

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Listings courtesy of Unlock MLS as distributed by MLS GRID

Based on information submitted to the MLS GRID as of October 16, 2026 at 7:15 AM CDT. All data obtained from various sources and may not have been verified by broker or MLS GRID.

Any use or search of data on the website, other than by a consumer looking to purchase real estate, is prohibited.