Two Homes Just Alike, Except One Has Air Conditioning

Here are two homes for sale in Katy. Same city, same season, same buyer pool. The only thing splitting them apart is whether the AC works.

Homes with air conditioning sold in a median of about 57 days this period. Homes without it took about 78 days. That's not a rounding difference. That's most of a month.

And the price gap runs the other way, which is the part worth sitting with. Homes with air conditioning had a median sale price of $290,000. Homes without air conditioning sold for a median of $369,990. I'm not going to tell you that's cause and effect, because the data doesn't say why buyers behaved that way. It only shows that this is what happened, across roughly a thousand sales, and the pattern is about as clean as this market ever gives us.

Let me put the two side by side plainly, because that's the whole point of this piece.

With air conditioning: about 57 days on market, median price $290,000.

Without air conditioning: about 78 days on market, median price $369,990.

On days on market, air conditioning wins outright. Faster to sell, less waiting, less wondering. On price, the no-AC homes carried a higher median, though that number is doing a lot of work covering other things about those particular homes, not just the missing unit.

So who does this matter to? If you own a home in Katy without central air and you're weighing whether to install it before you list, this is your number to sit with. Faster sale is a real, measured outcome here, not a guess. If your timeline matters more than squeezing out a top price, air conditioning is the side of this comparison you want to be standing on.

If you're not in a hurry, and you can carry a longer listing period without it costing you anything real, this data doesn't tell you to rush out and install a system. It tells you what trade-off you're making, not which choice is right for you. That part's yours to decide.

Across the wider Katy market this period, the median sold price came in at $322,358 and the median days on market was 67. Those numbers sit right where you'd expect between the two groups above, which is exactly why the split matters more than the average.

One more thing worth naming honestly: this pattern held up strongly enough, across a large enough sample, that it's the cleanest read in the data this period. Nothing else we looked at came close to explaining as much.

What I'll be watching next period is whether that price gap narrows or holds. If homes without air conditioning keep commanding a higher median even as they sit longer, that tells us something about what else is different about those listings. If it closes, the story gets simpler. Either way, I'll keep you posted.

Beverly