By Tara Williams
I divided all 2,286 current Johnson County listings by their square footage. The per-foot map looks nothing like the median-price map — and it moves budgets.
Buyers ask me two questions in the first ten minutes: "What's the median price in that city?" and "What do homes there go for per square foot?" I've written about the first one more than once. The second one deserves its own page, because the per-foot answer reorders the cities in a way most people don't expect — and it's the number that actually decides whether your budget buys a 2,600-square-foot house or a 3,700-square-foot one.
So this weekend I pulled every residential listing currently on the market or under contract in six Johnson County cities — 2,286 homes as of September 13, 2026 — and divided each one's list price by its square footage as reported in the MLS. Not the median price divided by the median size. Each house, individually. Here's the map that came out of it.
The Per-Foot Ranking (and Why It Isn't the Price Ranking)
| City | Listings | Median $/sq ft | Middle 50% ($/sq ft) | Median size | Median list price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Prairie Village | 97 | $356 | $255–$396 | 3,080 sq ft | $1,099,000 |
| Leawood | 183 | $289 | $222–$405 | 3,746 sq ft | $1,000,000 |
| Lenexa | 226 | $248 | $200–$281 | 2,637 sq ft | $614,950 |
| Overland Park | 739 | $242 | $194–$294 | 3,100 sq ft | $748,685 |
| Olathe | 801 | $237 | $199–$262 | 2,740 sq ft | $628,000 |
| Shawnee | 240 | $217 | $176–$255 | 2,853 sq ft | $525,000 |
Basis: Active, Pending and Active-Under-Contract residential listings in the MLS on September 13, 2026, city limits only, Kansas side. Square footage is what the listing agent entered, which means some include a finished lower level and some don't — treat every figure as a working number, not an appraisal.
Two things jump out. First, Prairie Village is the most expensive place in the county per foot, and it isn't close. Its median list price sits just above Leawood's, but per square foot it's $67 higher — a 23 percent premium — because the typical Prairie Village listing is roughly 670 square feet smaller. You're paying for the lot and the zip code, not the house.
Second, Leawood's median price is $1 million, but its per-foot number is only fourth-highest in the county once you account for how large the homes are. A 3,746-square-foot median is the biggest of the six cities by a wide margin. If you've ever been surprised that a Leawood house "felt like a lot of home for the money," this is why.
What the Same 3,000 Square Feet Costs in Each City
Multiply the medians out and the per-foot map turns into a budget map. At each city's median rate, a 3,000-square-foot house lists for roughly:
- Prairie Village: about $1,068,000
- Leawood: about $867,000
- Lenexa: about $744,000
- Overland Park: about $726,000
- Olathe: about $711,000
- Shawnee: about $651,000
Same house, on paper, and the gap between the top and bottom of the list is about $417,000. That's not a rounding error — that's a second property, or a full custom finish package, or a decade of private-school tuition, depending on what you'd rather do with it.
The middle four cities are much closer to one another than their reputations suggest. Lenexa, Overland Park and Olathe sit within $11 per foot of each other, which means the choice between them is rarely about price per foot at all. It's about commute, school boundary, and whether you want new construction or established trees. I wrote about that trade-off in the $700K test, and this data backs it up: in the middle of the county, your dollar buys about the same amount of house wherever you land, so choose on lifestyle.
The Spread Matters More Than the Median
The "middle 50 percent" column is the one I'd actually use if I were shopping. It tells you how far apart the cheap-per-foot and expensive-per-foot houses are inside a single city — and the cities differ enormously.
Olathe is the tightest market in the county. Half of everything listed there sits between $199 and $262 per foot, a $63 band. Even the 10th-to-90th percentile range only runs $169 to $287. Olathe's housing stock is younger and more uniform than the older cities', a lot of it is production-built, and that shows up as predictability. If you like knowing roughly what you'll pay before you tour, Olathe rewards you.
Leawood is the widest. The middle half runs $222 to $405, and the 10th-to-90th spread stretches from $183 all the way to $500 per foot. That's a 1970s ranch in the east-of-Mission-Road pockets on one end and a brand-new build in Hallbrook or on a teardown lot along the older streets on the other. The median tells you almost nothing about a specific Leawood house. Only the sub-neighborhood does — which is exactly why I map Leawood pocket by pocket rather than citywide.
Prairie Village is expensive at every rung. Even its 10th percentile is $216 per foot — essentially Shawnee's median. There is no "cheap" Prairie Village per foot; the entry point is what a mid-priced house costs elsewhere. Buyers who want Prairie Village need to walk in knowing that, because the numbers don't soften as you go smaller.
Shawnee is the value play, with a caveat. Its median is the lowest at $217, and its 25th percentile — $176 — is the lowest in the county. But its 90th percentile ($311) is nearly Lenexa's, because the western new-construction pockets I covered in the Shawnee new-construction guide price per foot like their Lenexa neighbors do. Citywide Shawnee is cheap per foot; west Shawnee is not.
How I Use This With Buyers
A few practical rules that fall out of the map:
Use per-foot to sanity-check a specific house, not to pick a city. If a listing is priced 20 percent above its city's middle band, there had better be a reason you can see — a finished walkout, a new build, a lot that backs to something. If you can't find the reason, that's your negotiation opening. The lot premium is the most common legitimate explanation; a fresh coat of paint is the most common illegitimate one.
Compare within the band, not across cities. A $300-per-foot house is a bargain in Prairie Village and an outlier in Olathe. The number only means something relative to its neighbors.
Remember that square footage is self-reported. Two houses with the same MLS square footage can differ by 800 finished feet depending on how the lower level was counted. Before you decide a house is "cheap per foot," I pull the county's assessed above-grade figure and check whether the listing is quoting total finished space. It changes the math more often than you'd think.
Watch the spread, because that's where deals live. The wider a city's band, the more mispriced homes it contains in both directions. Leawood's $183-to-$500 range is where I find the most under-the-radar value in the county — and also the most overpriced listings that sit for months. The missing-middle analysis I published in August is the price-band version of the same idea.
Want the Number for a Specific House?
This page is the county-level view. What I do for clients is the street-level version: the per-foot band for the exact sub-neighborhood, the assessed square footage, and what comparable homes actually closed at rather than what they listed for. If you're weighing two cities — or two houses — and want to know which one is truly the better deal per foot, reach out and I'll run the numbers. I refresh this pull every week, so the version you get will be current.
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