The entry point for the top 10 percent of the national housing market was $1,200,005 in August 2026, down 4.0 percent from a year earlier. The entry point for the top 1 percent was $5,163,712. That puts the ultra tier about 4.3 times higher than the merely luxurious. The figures come from Realtor.com's August Luxury Housing Report, released September 10.
Carry that 4.3 around with you. Realtor.com's senior economist, Anthony Smith, said it plainly: "The distance between the top 10% and the top 1% shows how each market is structured." A wide gap means a short list of addresses charges a premium for the name itself. A narrow one means the money is going into the house, the land and the view, not the brag.
There is also no single luxury price, which is the part most buyers get wrong. Earlier this year Realtor.com mapped the country into seven tiers using May 2026 data, and the entry point ran from roughly $759,000 in a metro like Huntsville, Alabama to north of $35 million on Fisher Island, Florida. "Luxury is not defined by one national price point," Smith said. The $1.2 million line is an average stretched over markets that have almost nothing in common.
For anyone weighing the Carolinas against the usual names, that resets the question. It is not whether a market clears some national bar. It is how wide that market's own top-10-to-top-1 gap runs, because the gap is the receipt for what you are actually paying for.
Keep it honest, though. A falling national threshold is not a sale, and it says nothing about any one street in Greenville or Charleston. Down 4.0 percent over a year is real and also modest, part of a drift that has run for more than two years. One national average is a weather report, not a forecast for your block.
So ask for the ratio before you ask for anything else. It will tell you whether you are shopping for a place or a label. In the Carolinas, more often than not, the answer comes back place.
If you are comparing the Carolinas against the familiar luxury names, the advisory conversation is complimentary, and we will run the ratio before the rendering.
All Field Notes