If a listing sheet, an old buyer's guide, or a well-meaning appraisal report still lists Valley View Elementary as the assigned campus for a home in the Eanes ISD footprint, that information is out of date. The Eanes ISD board voted in January 2025 to close Valley View after the 2024-25 school year and fold its students into Barton Creek Elementary starting with 2025-26. KUT reported the district was carrying an estimated $6.5 million deficit at the time, with Valley View operating at roughly half capacity. The campus is gone. Anyone using a map, a spreadsheet, or a memory from three years ago to answer the question "what school does this house feed" is working from a document that no longer describes the district.
That sounds like the kind of detail that should rattle a buyer mid-search. It mostly shouldn't, and understanding why tells you more about what you're actually paying for in this market than any single price-per-square-foot figure will.
A District Built Around One Line, Not Five
Eanes ISD is small on purpose. Five elementary campuses (Barton Creek, Bridge Point, Cedar Creek, Eanes, and Forest Trail), two middle schools, one high school, serving around 7,700 students total. Every child who enters at any of those five elementary doors, in any neighborhood the district touches, ends up at the same building nine years later: Westlake High School. There is no competing high school inside the district to sort families into. The elementary assignment shapes a child's first five years. It does not shape the diploma, the transcript, or the resale conversation a decade later.
That structure is what makes the Valley View closure a paperwork correction rather than a market event. The line that actually prices a home in this part of Austin was never the elementary boundary. It's the district boundary itself, the line that separates Eanes ISD from everything around it, and that line hasn't moved.
The Boundary That Sets the Price
Here's what crossing it costs, in the numbers that matter to a working budget rather than a marketing brochure. In the twelve months ending August 31, 2026, homes closing inside 78746, the zip code that holds West Lake Hills and Rollingwood, sold at a median of roughly $563 per square foot. Cross into 78738, still commutable, still Hill Country, but Lake Travis ISD territory, and the median falls to about $281 per square foot. Cross into 78732, Leander ISD, and it's about $271. Buyers on the Eanes side of those lines are paying close to double, per square foot, for a broadly comparable amount of house.
| Zip code | School district | Price per sq ft (TTM through Aug 2026) |
|---|---|---|
| 78746 | Eanes ISD | ~$563 |
| 78733 | Eanes ISD | ~$386 |
| 78738 | Lake Travis ISD | ~$281 |
| 78732 | Leander ISD | ~$271 |
The quieter zip inside the district tells the same story from a different angle. 78733, which covers Cuernavaca, Senna Hills, Barton Creek West, and Seven Oaks, still carries roughly a 1.5-times premium over its non-Eanes neighbors, even though it trades at meaningfully less per foot than 78746 itself. The district line is doing the pricing work in both places. The specific elementary campus inside that line is not.
That premium has also been getting more expensive to hold, not less. Between the twelve months ending August 2022 and the same window ending August 2026, price per square foot fell 9.5 percent in 78746 and 7.4 percent in 78733, against a 15.4 percent citywide decline and steeper drops of 13 to 15 percent in the neighboring non-Eanes zips. Measured against the city as a whole, the 78746 premium widened over that stretch, from 1.78 times Austin's price per foot to 1.90 times. What gave ground wasn't price. It was liquidity: months of inventory in 78746 rose from about 2.19 to 5.44 over that same period, and the share of listings that actually closed fell from roughly 76 percent to 56 percent. Buyers today have more room to negotiate than they did a few years ago. They are still negotiating over a line that costs twice as much per foot as the one next door.
Two Rankings, and Only One Moves the Market
Part of why that line holds its value is reputational, and the reputation is more contested than it looks from the outside. Niche's 2026 Texas district rankings put Eanes ISD at number one in the state. US News, which weights outcomes for disadvantaged student subgroups more heavily and ranks admission-based magnet campuses at the top of its scale, places Westlake far lower, at 53rd in Texas.
Both rankings are measuring something real. Only one of them moves prices, and it's the one that attaches to the district as a whole rather than to any single campus's granular outcome data. Buyers shopping this market are pricing in a brand: Eanes ISD, Westlake High School, the name that shows up on Niche. They are not pricing in the elementary-level distinctions that a school consolidation like Valley View's would actually disturb. That's a second reason the closure changes less than it seems to. The premium was never fine-grained enough to notice which of the five elementary buildings a child walks into.
The Quieter Half of the Premium
There's a second cost embedded in that district line that has nothing to do with test scores or rankings at all. On August 18, 2026, the Eanes ISD board adopted a tax rate of $0.8254 per $100 of value. The following night, Lake Travis ISD, sharing a border west of Austin, adopted $1.0329. Both districts operate under the same state-compressed maintenance and operations rate of $0.7054. The entire 20.75-cent gap between the two rates is debt service. Eanes carries about 12 cents of it. Lake Travis carries nearly 33.
That's the quiet half of what a buyer is purchasing when they cross into Eanes ISD. An older, largely built-out district with less bond debt outstanding costs less to service through the tax bill than a still-expanding one, even holding the classroom-level funding formula constant. It's not a number most buyers ask about, and it doesn't show up in a listing photo. It shows up every October on the property tax statement, and it compounds the same direction as the schools' reputation, not against it.
What Moves Prices Inside the Line
Once you're inside the boundary, the variation that actually explains one house costing more than another has almost nothing to do with which of the five elementary schools it feeds. In the twelve months ending August 2026, Lost Creek recorded 28 sales, more than any other Eanes neighborhood, at a median of $1,332,500 and roughly $512 per square foot. Senna Hills, a smaller enclave in 78733, saw 12 sales in the same window at a median of $1,345,000 and about $382 per square foot, a nearly identical price tag buying meaningfully more land. Seven Oaks and the acreage streets around Rob Roy sit at the other end entirely, with neighborhood medians running into the millions above that. None of that spread traces back to elementary assignment. It traces back to lot size, age of construction, and how much of the district's remaining large-lot inventory a given street still holds.
A Few Direct Questions
Does the Valley View closure change what school my child would attend if I buy in this area today? It might, if the address you're considering was previously zoned to Valley View. The correct answer is the same regardless: confirm the assigned elementary, middle, and high school directly through Eanes ISD's own boundary tools before writing an offer, not through a neighborhood guide or a listing description that may predate the 2025-26 change.
Does an elementary boundary shift affect resale value? Based on the structure of the district, not meaningfully on its own. Every Eanes ISD student outside of private alternatives eventually attends the same high school. The premium buyers pay attaches to that shared endpoint and to the district line itself, not to which of five elementary campuses a child starts at.
Is 78733 a genuinely cheaper way into Eanes ISD? On a price-per-square-foot basis, yes, it trades meaningfully below 78746. It also carries its own tradeoffs in commute distance and, in pockets like Barton Creek, boundary lines that split a single community between Eanes and Austin ISD block by block. The zip code is not a substitute for confirming the specific address.
If you're weighing a specific address against this boundary line, from a Lost Creek resale to a first look at Rollingwood, Local Color Realty Group can walk the comparables and the zoning verification with you before you write an offer, not after.
This article is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Consult a qualified professional about your situation.
