Pull up two browser tabs. In one, McAllister listings. In the other, Ennis. Write down the median price in each town and you'll have two numbers that look equally solid, equally specific, equally useful for comparing the two markets side by side.
Neither one means what you think it means.
That's not a knock on the data. It's what happens when a market gets small enough that a handful of unusual sales can swing the number more than the market itself moves. McAllister and Ennis are both small enough for this to happen right now, just in different ways. If you're comparing the two towns before you buy, the fix isn't a better median. It's knowing what's hiding inside the one you're looking at.
The Two Markets Living Inside One McAllister Number
McAllister, seven miles north of Ennis with its general store and post office sitting almost on the shore of Ennis Lake, doesn't have one housing market. It has two, and they get averaged together as if they were the same product.
The first is raw acreage. A recent count of active land listings near McAllister put the average asking price around $394,000, working out to roughly $17,560 per acre across the parcels on the market. That's the McAllister most people are actually buying into: a 5.2-acre parcel in the Shining Mountains West subdivision listed at $162,000, a 5-acre lot at Wey's View for $364,900, an 88-acre parcel in the Twin Knob PUD at $749,000. Bare ground, no lake frontage guaranteed, priced by the acre.
The second market is a small cluster of improved homes and waterfront legacy properties that barely resembles the first. A cabin on Redtail Hawk Road, 1,344 square feet, listed near $925,000. A larger home on Dolly Varden Drive at just under $970,000. A custom four-bedroom on North Meadow Creek Road at $3.39 million. Layer in listings like a 56-acre ranch with Ennis Lake views and a legacy property spanning more than 2,700 acres on the lake's north shore, and you start to see why one broker's site can report a McAllister median list price near $2.95 million while Dawn's own community guide describes typical home prices as running from the mid-$400,000s to just over $1 million as of early 2026.
Both numbers are true. They're just describing different slices of the same tiny town.
| Listing | Type | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Parcel 87b, Shining Mountains West | 5.2 acres, unimproved | $162,000 |
| Lot 4, Wey's View | 5-acre buildable lot | $364,900 |
| 49 Redtail Hawk Road | 2BR cabin, 1,344 sq ft | $924,900 |
| 3 Dolly Varden Drive | 3BR home, 2,885 sq ft | $969,900 |
| Lot 4 & 7, Twin Knob PUD | 88.09 acres | $749,000 |
| 952 N Meadow Creek Road | 4BR custom home, 4,518 sq ft | $3,390,000 |
A market that includes both a $162,000 raw lot and a $3.39 million custom home has a median that depends entirely on which handful of properties happened to be listed the day someone ran the calculation. One brokerage's own count showed the majority of current McAllister listings priced between $100,000 and $200,000, even while the reported median list price sat north of $2.9 million. That gap is the story. In a market this thin, a small number of high-end listings pull the median far above where most buyers are actually shopping.
Ennis Has A Different Version Of The Same Problem
Ennis is a bigger, more liquid market than McAllister, but it's still small enough that four different sources can report four different medians for the same town in the same year without any of them being wrong.
One count, using closed sales data through June 2026, put the median sale price for all Ennis home types at $447,257, down 16.7 percent year over year. A separate count, current as of April 2026, put the median home price at $654,500 with an average sale price of $597,026. A local brokerage's summer 2026 figure listed the median asking price around $744,000. A fourth report, drawing on regional MLS data from this spring, cited a median sale price of $785,000, up 5.37 percent year over year, alongside a jump in active inventory of 118 percent and a median time on market of 178 days.
Those four numbers can't all be describing the same static market, because they're not measuring the same thing. Some are list prices. Some are closed sale prices. Some cover a specific window of weeks; others summarize a broader stretch of the year. And when inventory doubles the way it has in Ennis, and homes are sitting for nearly six months before selling, the mix of what actually closes in any given month can shift the median without a single home changing in value. A market with 178-day average marketing time and inventory up 118 percent year over year isn't unstable. It's just large enough now to be describing several different sub-markets under one town name, the same way McAllister does with land and lake frontage.
What To Ask Instead Of "What's The Median?"
If you're comparing McAllister to Ennis, or comparing either one to wherever you're moving from, the median by itself won't get you there. A few better questions will:
- Is this a list price or a closed sale price, and over what window of time?
- How many sales actually fed this number? A median built from eight closings behaves nothing like one built from eighty.
- In McAllister, ask for price per acre on raw land and price per foot of frontage on anything touching Ennis Lake or the Madison River, rather than a single blended home price that mixes both categories.
- What share of current inventory is land versus finished structures? That ratio alone can move a town's reported median without any actual home changing in value.
Buyers who ask these questions before writing an offer negotiate from a much stronger position than buyers who walk in quoting a headline number pulled off a portal.
The Two Tabs, Revisited
Go back to those two browser tabs. Instead of writing down "$744,000" for Ennis and "$2.9 million" for McAllister, try writing down two different columns: price per acre, and how many sales the number is built on. That's the comparison that actually holds up when you're standing on a specific parcel deciding what it's worth.
McAllister and Ennis are both good arguments for buying in the Madison Valley. Neither one is well served by a single median price doing the talking.
A Few Straight Answers
Is McAllister more expensive than Ennis? It depends entirely on which McAllister you're pricing. Raw acreage in McAllister often runs cheaper per acre than in-town Ennis lots, while a handful of Ennis Lake and Madison River frontage properties in McAllister can price well above anything currently listed in Ennis proper.
Why do Ennis price reports disagree so much? Because they're measuring different things. List price and sold price are not the same figure, and a market with inventory up sharply and homes taking longer to sell will show different medians depending on the exact window and dataset a source pulls from.
How thin is the McAllister market really? Thin enough that recent counts showed only a few dozen active land parcels and roughly two dozen homes for sale at any given time. That's a small enough pool that one or two unusual listings can move the median more than actual market conditions do.
If you're weighing McAllister against Ennis, or against anywhere else in the valley, the numbers on a portal are a starting point, not an answer. Dawn Myrvik has spent more than two decades reading these markets parcel by parcel, and she can help you figure out what a specific price is actually built on before you make an offer. Connect with Dawn to start your Montana lifestyle search.
