In Washington Township, the roads for a new phase of estate homes priced from $1.3 million to $2.5 million have gone in this year, with home construction slated to start this fall. A few miles away, the typical home listed in Centerville proper is asking under $400,000 and going pending in about two weeks. Both numbers get folded into the same headline: "the Centerville housing market." Neither describes the other.
The gap is not really about taste or sudden demand. It traces back to something as unglamorous as sanitary sewer capacity, and once you understand it, the median price everyone quotes this summer starts to look like a description of a market that barely exists as one thing.
The Number Everyone Quotes
Zillow put the average Centerville home value at $390,231 as of May 2026, up 3.3% over the prior year. Separately, homes listed to buy in Centerville carried a median price of $369,000 in July 2026, with a typical time to pending of just 16 days, matching the same month a year earlier. Those figures circulate in every market update because they're easy to pull, but they blend two very different housing stocks into one line. One is an established resale base built mostly from the 1970s through the early 2000s. The other is a wave of new luxury inventory landing this year at four to six times that price. When one number is asked to represent both, it stops being useful for pricing an actual house.
What the Sewer Line Actually Explains
For years, two planned Washington Township developments, Washington Twp. Estates and Kensington Grove, sat stalled. The Montgomery County Engineer's Office had informed the developer there was no sanitary sewer capacity available to support additional building. That issue has since been resolved, clearing the way for Design Homes to move forward not only on the original parcels but on an expansion called Mill Creek, according to Dayton Daily News reporting.
Mill Creek East will add 38 single-family homes on 26.3 acres along Clyo Road, with home construction expected to begin in the fourth quarter of 2026. A second phase, Mill Creek West, would add another 97 homes on 59 acres at the Clyo and Nutt Road intersection, though Design Homes principal Lance Oakes said that phase depends on how well the first sells and likely won't break ground before 2028.
"It'll be the same house style, same approvals, same HOA, all of that," Oakes said of the two phases.
The homes themselves average around 3,500 square feet with four to five bedrooms, and Design Homes has priced them between $1.3 million and as much as $2.5 million. This isn't organic demand simply catching up with the market overnight. It's a permitting bottleneck breaking open all at once, releasing years of stalled capacity into one narrow, ultra high end price band.
Three Markets, One ZIP Code
Line these three segments up and the picture gets clearer than any single median could make it.
| Segment | Example | Price Band | What It Signals |
|---|---|---|---|
| Citywide resale | Centerville listings overall, July 2026 | ~$369K median list | The broad, slower-moving base most sales still happen in |
| Established premium resale | Garage-equipped listings currently in The Golf Club at Yankee Trace | ~$555K median list, roughly 40 days on market | Mature neighborhoods with course access, not new inventory |
| New luxury construction | Mill Creek East, Washington Township | $1.3M to $2.5M | Sewer-constrained supply released at once, not tied to broader demand |
If you're comparing a listing in Waterbury Woods or Winding Creek to a friend's new build going up in Mill Creek, you're not competing in the same lane, and neither is your buyer pool. A buyer shopping the citywide $369,000 median also won't find themselves inside Yankee Trace, where garage homes have carried a median asking price near $555,000 in recent weeks. Three price bands, three different sets of comparable sales, one ZIP code.
If You're Selling in an Established Neighborhood
A few things worth keeping in mind if your home sits in one of Washington Township's older subdivisions rather than in a builder's new phase:
- Your comps live inside your own subdivision. Appraisers pull from recent sales in Winding Creek, Soraya Farms, or Waterbury Woods, not from a builder's price sheet three tiers up the road.
- Buyers shopping the $400,000 to $600,000 range increasingly know a brand-new alternative exists nearby. Presentation, not price alone, is what keeps a resale listing competitive against a builder's fresh finishes and warranty.
- A home that shows well against new construction, clean lines, updated fixtures, a kitchen that doesn't read as dated, tends to close faster in a market where buyers are actively weighing move-in-ready new builds as an option.
If You're Buying Right Now
The luxury pipeline isn't the only thing expanding in this corridor. CRG Residential broke ground on a $58.1 million, 272-unit apartment community in Washington Township, positioned near Whole Foods, Kroger, and Starbucks, with an opening targeted for later this year, according to CRG's own announcement. That's a separate signal worth weighing if you're deciding between renting and buying in the same area while prices sort themselves out across the three tiers above.
For buyers closer to the resale-to-new-construction line, M/I Homes' Sorrento community in the Centerville City School District is currently offering a 2/1 rate buydown, with a first-year rate as low as 3.25% on new homes that can close by October 30, 2026. That's a real, time-limited lever, not a marketing footnote, and it changes the monthly math enough that it's worth running against any resale option you're comparing it to.
A Few Questions Worth Asking Before You Price or Offer
Will Mill Creek's prices pull up values in older Washington Township neighborhoods? Not directly. Appraisals rely on comparable recent sales within a similar age, style, and distance, so a $1.8 million new build two roads over won't move the needle for a 1985 colonial in an established subdivision. Over time, though, those higher-end sales do eventually feed into broader area averages, which is part of why citywide numbers keep climbing even as the typical resale buyer's experience stays fairly stable.
When will Mill Creek West actually break ground? Not yet, and possibly not for a while. Oakes has been clear that the second phase depends on how the first 38 lots sell, with a realistic construction start no earlier than 2028.
Is the broader Centerville market still competitive for a typical resale buyer? It is. Homes are still moving in about two weeks on average as of July 2026, on par with the year before. The luxury pipeline changes what gets built next, not how quickly an ordinary resale listing finds a buyer today.
If you're weighing whether your home belongs in the resale conversation or trying to figure out what a new luxury build down the road actually means for your own listing, I'd rather walk through your specific comps than let a citywide average do the talking. That's the kind of read only someone tracking this market street by street can give you.
Juliet Wenzler and the Wenzler Concierge Group work this corridor every week, from established Washington Township subdivisions to the new construction reshaping Clyo Road. Schedule your complimentary concierge consultation and let's figure out which market your home is actually in.
