Why Alpine, Wyoming Homes Cost a Fraction of Jackson Hole's Address

Alpine sits at the literal front door of Jackson Hole. Drive northeast on Highway 89 through the Snake River Canyon and you're in Jackson in about 36 miles. Locals call the town Alpine Junction because that's exactly what it is, the spot where Highway 26 and Highway 89 meet before splitting travelers toward the Tetons or south into the rest of Star Valley.

None of that shows up in the price tag. As of late August 2026, Zillow's home value index put the average Jackson home at $2,014,169. Alpine's average, in the same index, was $704,012. A 36-mile drive separates the two towns. A gap of nearly three-to-one separates the price of a house in each.

Most explanations for that gap stop at scenery or status, as if Jackson simply charges more because it can. That's true as far as it goes, but it skips the mechanism that actually sets the price, and understanding that mechanism tells a buyer something the raw numbers don't: which parts of this gap are permanent, and which parts are already starting to move.

The Number Behind the Number

Jackson's price growth isn't really about demand outrunning supply in the usual sense. It's about supply that can't respond to demand at all. Teton County is overwhelmingly public land, and what's left in private hands is tightly zoned. Cowboy State Daily reported in April 2024 that Jackson had roughly 13,000 deeded properties but only 150 active listings, a fraction so small that broker David Viehman told the paper it represented about 1.2% of the market, down from the 11% he saw when he moved to the valley in 1992. A year later, SnowBrains reported that vacant single-family lots in Jackson had fewer than nine months of inventory at the market's absorption rate, even as the average listing price for a single-family home reached $10.7 million as of April 1, 2025.

By the end of 2025, according to the Jackson Hole Real Estate Report as cited by Cowboy State Daily, the average home sale price across the valley had climbed to $6.15 million, up from $1.85 million in 2016. That's not a market responding to a hot decade. That's a market with almost nowhere left to build, absorbing a decade of buyers into a supply that barely grew at all.

Star Valley doesn't have that ceiling. There's no equivalent wall of national forest and conservation easement locking up the land around Alpine the way it does around Jackson. That single structural difference, not the view, not the ski lift access, is the real reason a home at the base of the same mountains costs a fraction as much thirty-some miles south.

Growth Doesn't Disappear. It Moves.

Land that's plentiful isn't land without limits, though, and Star Valley is starting to bump into its own. The clearest evidence sits just outside Alpine's town line, at a gravel operation locals call the Alpine Bear Pit.

In 2024, the Jackson Hole News&Guide reported that Sunroc Corporation had asked the Bureau of Reclamation for permission to more than triple the pit's footprint, expanding west into the mud flats of Palisades Reservoir near Melvin Brewing. The company's reasoning was straightforward. Star Valley's growth since the pandemic had outpaced the material needed to build it.

"The material is needed," Sunroc's director of government and community relations told the paper.

More than 400 residents signed a petition opposing the scale of the expansion, a number equal to roughly 30% of Alpine's population by the 2020 census. Nobody in that dispute was arguing that Alpine had stopped growing. They were arguing about how much gravel that growth should be allowed to cost the reservoir.

That's the pattern worth watching if you're comparing Alpine to Jackson on price alone. Abundant land buys you room that Jackson doesn't have. It doesn't buy you a pause button on the infrastructure and material costs that come with actually using that room.

The Town Is Asking Washington for Help

The same growth shows up in Alpine's own paperwork, not from a booster's brochure but from a technical procurement document. In December 2025, the Town of Alpine issued a request for proposals for a Highway 26/89 Transportation Safety Action Plan, funded through the federal Safe Streets for All program. The RFP's own description of the town is blunt.

"The Town of Alpine is a rapidly growing rural community located at the convergence of U.S. Highways 26 and 89, two high-volume regional corridors serving commuters, freight carriers, recreational traffic, and seasonal visitors."

The document goes on to note that the same intersection serving as Alpine's downtown corridor is also carrying regional through-traffic, and that continued population growth and rising commercial activity are straining a road network that wasn't built for either. The evaluation period on that RFP runs through the end of this month.

A town doesn't apply for federal safety funding on a highway that isn't already busy. Alpine is asking for help managing a level of traffic and commercial activity that, by its own account, has outgrown the intersection it was built around.

What the Gap Actually Buys You

None of this means the Jackson-to-Alpine price gap is an illusion. It's real, and the land-supply mechanism behind it isn't going anywhere soon. What a buyer weighing both markets should understand is what that gap converts into on the ground.

• More land per dollar, since Star Valley's private land isn't constrained the way Teton County's is
• A meaningfully younger and more varied housing stock, since new construction remains physically possible here in a way it largely isn't in Jackson
• Direct access to the Snake River and Palisades Reservoir at an entry price nowhere near what comparable water access costs in Jackson
• A wider range of price points within town limits, from smaller starter homes up through a luxury pocket near the reservoir, rather than a market where, as of April 2025, only 30% of Jackson's inventory was priced under $5 million

That last point matters more than it looks. Alpine's own numbers aren't as tidy as they first appear, and the messiness is instructive. Zillow's index shows Alpine's average home value down 1.6% over the year ending in late August 2026. Homes.com, looking at the trailing 12 months through this September, shows the median sale price up 10% over the previous 12 months. Those two numbers describe the same small town and point in opposite directions.

The explanation isn't a data error. It's sample size. Homes.com counted 36 sales in Alpine over the past year, an average of three closings a month. A market that thin will show a different shape depending on whether you're tracking a repeat-sales index like Zillow's or a raw median like Homes.com's, because a single high-end closing near the reservoir or a single modest starter home can swing the monthly number by a wide margin. Redfin's own snapshot, a median of $799,000 over the three months ending in May 2026, sits higher than both. None of the three is wrong. They're measuring a market small enough that the measuring stick matters as much as the market itself.

The practical takeaway for a buyer comparing Alpine to Jackson isn't to pick a favorite index. It's to treat any single average as a starting point, not an answer, and to look at the actual comparable sales for the specific street or subdivision in question before drawing conclusions about direction.

A Few Questions Worth Asking Before You Compare the Two

Is Alpine really priced off Jackson, or is that a coincidence of geography? The proximity matters, but the price gap traces back to land availability more than distance. Jackson's supply is capped by public land and conservation restrictions in a way Star Valley's isn't, and that structural difference explains far more of the gap than the 36 miles between them.

Will Alpine's prices keep closing the distance with Jackson's? Nothing in the current data suggests a fast convergence. What the gravel pit dispute and the Highway 89 safety project both suggest is that Alpine's growth is real and ongoing, which is a different question from whether prices are converging with Jackson's on any predictable timeline.

Does the Highway 89 project affect people who already live along that corridor? It's worth watching if you own or are considering property directly on Highway 26/89 through town. The RFP describes turning conflicts, high approach speeds, and limited pedestrian crossings as active safety concerns, which means future changes to access points, crossings, or traffic patterns along that stretch are a real possibility as the plan moves forward.

If you're weighing Alpine against Jackson, or trying to figure out what a specific property here is actually worth given how noisy the averages can get, Speakman Realty Group spends every week comparing the two markets deed by deed rather than index by index. You can browse current Alpine listings or pull the latest Star Valley market report for a closer look at what's actually selling, and where.