If you have already pulled up listings in The Highlands, you have probably run into a stat that doesn't add up. Homes there took a median of 178 days to sell between January 2025 and March 2026, more than double the 78-day median across the 36 Oxford subdivisions tracked over that same window. The obvious read is that buyers are cooling on Oxford's most exclusive lake address. But the price data says otherwise: at a median of $273 per square foot over that same 15-month stretch, Highlands homes actually sold for less per foot than newer subdivisions like The Grove at Grand Oaks, which cleared listings at $340 per square foot in just 79 days. A neighborhood that markets itself as the most luxurious property in North Mississippi is neither the priciest per foot in town nor the fastest to move. Something else is driving that number, and it matters whether you're pricing a listing there or writing an offer.
Two different markets wearing one zip code
Part of the answer is in the size range of what actually sold. Highlands closings from that period ran from 2,511 to 6,252 square feet, a spread wide enough to suggest you are not looking at one product. The neighborhood's covenant sets a floor near 3,000 square feet for standard lots, in line with the kind of size minimums common to Oxford's larger planned communities. That floor doesn't apply everywhere. The developer's own site separately markets The Highlands alongside The Cottages at The Highlands, a smaller-footprint section built for empty nesters and retirees. That second product line is almost certainly where the dataset's smaller closings come from, since nothing at 2,511 square feet clears a 3,000-square-foot covenant on the main lots.
That distinction matters more than it looks. A retiree buying a smaller cottage and a family building a custom estate on a lake lot are not shopping the same market, financing the same way, or moving on the same timeline. Blend their closings into a single "Highlands" line item and you get a median that describes neither buyer accurately. It's a composite of two different transactions pretending to be one number.
Fourteen sales is not enough to trust an average
The other half of the story is simple arithmetic. Fourteen closed transactions across 15 months works out to less than one sale per month. In a dataset that thin, a single custom home that spent an extra four months finishing interior work before closing, or one cottage that sat through a slow winter, can drag a median from ordinary to alarming almost by itself. There is no cushion of volume to smooth out an outlier the way there is in a subdivision moving 19 or more homes a year.
Compare that to The Grove at Grand Oaks, which closed 19 sales in the same window at a median of 79 days, close to the citywide pace of 78 days. Grove is a newer, single-product pipeline: buyers there are largely shopping the same kind of new-construction estate home, at a similar size and price point, which means the market has enough repetition to produce a number you can actually lean on. Highlands, by contrast, is asking one figure to describe a spring-fed lake estate and a retiree cottage in the same breath, with barely more than a dozen data points to do it. When a subdivision's own reporting notes that its slow pace "may reflect new construction absorption timelines," that is a polite way of saying the same thing: a few builds still working through their finishing schedule can single-handedly define the headline number for the whole year.
A lake that has already finished waiting
Part of what makes The Highlands attractive is also part of why its market moves the way it does. The neighborhood's lake, close to 85 private acres by the developer's own description, is spring fed and was built out two decades ago. The levee was completed on August 14, 2002, reached spillway level and began discharging less than seven months later on March 3, 2003, and the lake was stocked that November with 70,000 copper nose bluegill bream and red ear shellcrackers alongside 70,000 fathead minnows. That is not a fresh amenity still being built out. It is a mature, established feature that has already shaped two decades of tree canopy, shoreline, and neighborhood character.
A built-out, mature lake community naturally produces fewer new listings in any given year than a subdivision still selling raw lots. Fewer listings means fewer chances for a quick match between a specific buyer and a specific home, especially when that home sits on a covenant-protected lot built for a particular kind of estate living. The lake is the draw. It is also part of why the buyer pool for any single listing is narrower than it looks on paper.
What this means if you're buying or selling here
If you are listing a standard-covenant home in The Highlands, the 178-day median is not a signal that something is wrong with your price. It is closer to a baseline for a low-volume, large-lot product with a narrow buyer pool. Pricing defensively out of fear of that number, or panicking at day 90 in a market where six months is closer to normal for that size of home, will likely cost you more than the extra weeks on market.
If you are buying, the number cuts the other way. A slower average marketing period in the standard Highlands lots can translate into real negotiating room, particularly on a home that has been listed well past the neighborhood's own median. But that leverage does not automatically extend to The Cottages at The Highlands. A smaller, retiree-oriented product with its own narrower and highly motivated buyer pool could easily be moving on a different clock entirely, and the 178-day figure tells you nothing specific about it. Before you anchor an offer, or a listing price, to the headline days-on-market number, ask which of the two Highlands products you are actually looking at, and ask for that segment's own recent closings rather than the blended neighborhood figure.
Frequently asked questions
Does a 178-day median mean I can lowball an offer in The Highlands? Not automatically. That figure blends two different products across only 14 sales, so it tells you more about the neighborhood as a whole than about any individual listing. A home that has genuinely sat well past that median, in the segment it actually belongs to, is a stronger basis for a negotiating position than the headline number alone.
Are The Highlands and The Cottages at The Highlands governed by the same rules? They are marketed as connected sections of the same development, but the smaller Cottages product exists specifically to serve buyers who don't need or want the larger covenant-minimum lots. Anyone comparing pricing or timelines across the two should confirm which section's covenants and homeowners association terms apply to a specific address before writing an offer.
Why isn't Oxford's most luxurious address also its highest price per square foot? Price per square foot reflects what has actually closed in a given window, and The Highlands' 15-month sample includes both large custom estates and smaller retiree homes. A newer, single-product subdivision built entirely around one home size and price point, like The Grove at Grand Oaks, will often post a cleaner and higher per-foot figure simply because it isn't averaging two different markets together.
If you are trying to figure out whether a specific Highlands listing is priced to the standard-lot market or the Cottages market, or whether a slow days-on-market figure is a red flag or an opening, that is exactly the kind of read that benefits from someone who tracks these subdivisions closing by closing. Noelle Goubeaux works Oxford's neighborhoods this closely because the headline number is rarely the whole story. Request a Free Home Valuation & Private Listing Access to talk through where your Highlands home, or the one you're watching, actually fits.
