Houston: two sellers for every buyer, and the port just set a record

Harris County, September 2026

Two numbers from the same month describe the same county, and most people writing about Houston only use one of them.

The first: Redfin counts about 130 percent more sellers than buyers in the Houston metro, the widest gap of any large market in the country, and 19.6 percent of contracts fell through in July, second only to Jacksonville. The Houston Association of Realtors logged 38,947 active listings in August against 7,100 closings, down 11.5 percent from a year ago. 5.3 months of supply, a median that slipped to $330,000, and homes sitting two months.

The second: Port Houston moved 2.23 million containers in the first half of the year, the best six months in its history. The wider ship channel handled 65 million tons in the first quarter, up 12 percent, with exports up 19 percent. Twenty seven Fortune 500 companies are headquartered here, tied for second in the country with Chicago and about to pass it when Expand Energy finishes moving from Oklahoma City to Spring later this year. Six of the twenty seven arrived since 2020. The county hosted seven World Cup matches this summer. The Texas Medical Center is the largest medical complex on earth and is still building.

The first set of numbers is a supply story. The second is a demand story. In most metros those move together. In Houston right now they are pointed in opposite directions, and understanding why is most of what there is to understand about Harris County. This is the longest piece in the series because it is the county the publication is written from, and because there is more here than anywhere else in the state.

The county that matches its name

Houston is the Texas metro where the brand and the county line mostly agree. The Astros play downtown at Daikin Park. The Texans and the Rodeo are at NRG Park inside the loop. The Rockets are at Toyota Center. The Dynamo and the Dash are at Shell Energy Stadium in the East End. ExxonMobil's headquarters is in Spring, in Harris County. So is Hewlett Packard Enterprise's, and so will Expand Energy's. Chevron moved its headquarters downtown in 2024. NASA's Johnson Space Center is in Clear Lake, in the county's southeast corner. The Texas Medical Center, the port, the Energy Corridor, the Galleria, River Oaks, the Heights, Katy's eastern half, and all of Cypress, Klein, Tomball, Humble, and Kingwood are inside the line.

What is not: The Woodlands is Montgomery County. Sugar Land and Katy's newer western growth are Fort Bend. Fulshear, the fastest growing city in the country this decade, is Fort Bend. Pearland is Brazoria. Baytown's refineries are Harris; Beaumont and Port Arthur are Jefferson. The county is 1,700 square miles and holds close to five million people, more than 26 states, and the parts of the metro that have grown fastest since 2020 are just across its western and northern edges.

That matters for reading the listings. Harris County's 38,947 active homes include a great deal of older inventory inside the Beltway that is competing with new construction in Fort Bend and Montgomery at similar prices. The sellers are in Harris. A meaningful share of the buyers are one county over.

No zoning, and what that actually means

Houston is the largest city in the United States without a zoning code. Voters rejected zoning in 1948, 1962, and 1993. What the city has instead is deed restrictions, which are private covenants attached to subdivisions, and a set of ordinances governing setbacks, parking, lot size, and historic districts. A developer who wants to build apartments next to a single family neighborhood generally can, unless the neighborhood's deed restrictions forbid it, and the neighborhoods that can afford lawyers have restrictions that do.

The result is a city that builds. Houston has added housing faster than any other large American metro for two decades, which is the deep reason it is the cheapest major city in the country and the reason it has two sellers for every buyer this year: supply here responds to price in a way it cannot in Austin's hills or Dallas's northern suburbs, let alone anywhere on either coast. The lack of zoning is why a townhome gets built on a lot in the Heights that held a bungalow, why the Galleria has 40 story towers next to strip centers, why the East End is turning into apartments block by block, and why Houston's median price is $330,000 while the national median is $427,000 for a metro with a larger economy than most countries.

It is also why Houston looks the way it does, which is not for everyone, and why flooding is a land use problem here as much as a weather one. The tradeoff is real. But for anyone underwriting a Texas metro on affordability and the ability to add supply, Houston's non zoning is not a quirk. It is the structural reason the city works.

The listed companies

Houston's Fortune 500 count is 27 on the 2026 list, tied with Chicago and ahead of Dallas Fort Worth at 24. The tie understates it. Houston's 27 generated nearly twice Chicago's combined revenue, because the list is led by ExxonMobil at number 9 and Chevron at 21. Below them, in rough order: Phillips 66, Sysco, ConocoPhillips, Enterprise Products Partners, Plains, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, NRG Energy, Quanta Services, Baker Hughes, Occidental Petroleum, Waste Management, EOG Resources, Group 1 Automotive, Halliburton, Kinder Morgan, Cheniere, Targa Resources, CenterPoint Energy, Westlake, and Crown Castle. Devon Energy, which merged with Houston's Coterra in May, kept its headquarters here.

Read that list by what it is rather than by what it is called. ExxonMobil and Chevron are the two largest American oil companies. Phillips 66 is one of the largest refiners. ConocoPhillips, Occidental, and EOG are the largest independent producers, and Occidental is also the company building the largest direct air capture plant in the world in West Texas. Enterprise, Plains, Kinder Morgan, and Targa are the pipeline and midstream backbone of the Permian and the Gulf Coast; Kinder Morgan alone moves about 40 percent of the natural gas consumed in the country. Cheniere is the largest LNG exporter in the United States. Halliburton and Baker Hughes are two of the three largest oilfield services firms on earth, and SLB, the third, runs much of its operation from Houston as well. That is the energy stack, top to bottom, headquartered in one county.

Then the ones that are not energy. Sysco is the largest food distributor in the world. Waste Management is the largest waste company in North America. Quanta Services is the largest electric infrastructure contractor in the country, which means it is the company building the transmission lines and substations for every data center in the 474 gigawatt ERCOT queue, and its stock has quietly become one of the best performing industrials of the decade. Hewlett Packard Enterprise moved from San Jose in 2022 and is one of the two largest AI server makers in the country alongside Dell. Crown Castle owns more cell towers than anyone in America. CenterPoint is the utility that keeps the lights on, or in the summer of 2024 did not, and is spending several billion dollars on grid hardening as a result. Group 1 is one of the largest auto dealers. Academy Sports is in Katy. Insperity is in Kingwood. Camden Property Trust, one of the largest apartment REITs in the country, is in the Galleria area.

Six Fortune 500 companies have relocated here since 2020. Exxon from Irving in 2023, to a 385 acre campus in Spring built for 10,000 employees. Chevron from San Ramon, California, completing the move in 2025 into 1500 Louisiana downtown. HPE from San Jose in 2022, also to Spring. Expand Energy from Oklahoma City this year, also to Spring. The early arrivals came for cost and taxes. The recent ones, from Oklahoma rather than California, came for something else: the Greater Houston Partnership's own read is that energy companies now move here for the talent, the infrastructure, and the density of the industry. When a company already in a low tax state moves to Houston, cost was not the reason.

Notice the geography. Exxon, HPE, and Expand are all in Spring, on the Grand Parkway in the far north of the county, in campuses built on ranchland. The Energy Corridor along Interstate 10 west of the Beltway holds Shell's Woodcreek campus, BP America, ConocoPhillips, Citgo, and most of the oilfield services firms. Halliburton is north on the Beltway. Sysco is on the west side. Chevron is the exception and took a downtown tower. The headquarters growth in this county is a suburban campus story, and it explains a great deal about the office market below.

NASA

Johnson Space Center sits on 1,600 acres in Clear Lake, in the southeast corner of the county, and has been the home of American human spaceflight since 1961. Mission Control is here. Every Apollo, Shuttle, and Station mission was run from this county, and Artemis, the program to return to the Moon, is run from here now. JSC employs more than 10,000 civil servants and contractors and anchors an aerospace cluster along the Gulf Freeway that includes Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Jacobs, KBR, and Axiom Space, the company building the commercial successor to the International Space Station from a facility at Ellington Field.

The connection to the rest of this piece is direct. SpaceX's headquarters is at Starbase in Cameron County, but the NASA contracts that pay for its Dragon and Starship programs are administered from Clear Lake, and the astronauts who fly on them train here. Houston has been the space city since before it was the energy city, and the two industries are converging: the same engineers, the same materials, the same Gulf Coast supply chain. Space Center Houston, the visitor center, draws more than a million people a year.

The port

Port Houston is the largest port in the United States by total waterborne tonnage and the busiest by vessel calls, with more than 200 private terminals and eight public ones along a 52 mile channel that runs from Galveston Bay to the Turning Basin east of downtown. It is also the largest energy export gateway in the country, which is the sentence that matters this year.

First quarter tonnage through the channel was 65 million short tons, up 12 percent. Exports were 54 million of that, up 19 percent. Petroleum gases up 33 percent, refined products up 24 percent, crude up 19 percent. Those numbers were set before the Strait of Hormuz went to a fifth of its normal flow and before Saudi Arabia shut its East West pipeline. The second half will be larger than the first.

Containers, the part of the port that reflects the consumer economy rather than the energy one, set a record too: 2.23 million TEUs in the first half, up 3 percent on 2025's record year, with June alone up 18 percent on a 27 percent jump in loaded imports. Steel imports are down 14 percent on the year, a tariff effect, but general cargo and breakbulk are up more than 30 percent. Resin exports, the petrochemical complex on the channel turning gas into plastic pellets for the world, are the port's most durable outbound line. Port Houston just added a thousand feet of wharf at Bayport and 16 new cranes, bringing the fleet to 163.

One structural note from the Corpus Christi piece applies here in reverse. Corpus loads very large crude carriers directly since its channel went to 54 feet last year. Houston's channel is going to 46 and a half feet under Project 11, and the largest tankers still lighter offshore. When ships are scarce, as they are this month with freight adding $26 a barrel on the Asia run, the port that needs fewer of them per barrel has the edge on crude, and that port is Corpus. Houston's advantage is everything else: the refineries, the world's largest petrochemical complex, the container terminals, the rail, the two hundred private docks. Corpus moves crude. Houston moves the economy.

The Medical Center

The Texas Medical Center is the largest medical complex in the world. About 1,300 acres south of downtown, more than 60 institutions, more than 100,000 employees, roughly ten million patient encounters a year, and a budget larger than most states' health systems. MD Anderson is ranked the number one cancer hospital in the country by U.S. News and has been for most of the last two decades. Houston Methodist is the top hospital in Texas. Texas Children's is the largest children's hospital in the country. Memorial Hermann, Baylor College of Medicine, UT Health, and Rice's biosciences programs fill out a research base that no other county in Texas approaches, and TMC Helix Park, the new research and commercial campus on the medical center's south side, is the largest life sciences development under construction in the region.

The Medical Center is the county's largest employer by a wide margin and the one that does not move with oil. Health care is the sector the Greater Houston Partnership expects to lead job growth over the next year. When the energy cycle turns, and it always turns, this is what holds.

The Rodeo

The Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo runs for three weeks every March at NRG Park and is the largest livestock exhibition and rodeo in the world. Attendance runs above two and a half million. It has committed more than half a billion dollars to Texas youth and education since 1932 through scholarships and grants, funded by ticket sales, the carnival, the auctions, and the concert series, which has put nearly every major American act on the same stage as the bull riding. It is run largely by volunteers, more than thirty thousand of them, which is the same civic capacity observation from the Fredericksburg piece at a scale a hundred times larger.

For a county reader, the Rodeo is the clearest evidence of what Houston's institutions look like when they work: privately organized, enormous, philanthropic, and rooted in an agricultural identity the city has not had for a century but has never let go of.

Sports

All four major franchises play inside the county, which no other Texas metro can say.

The Astros won the World Series in 2017 and 2022 and have been in the playoffs nearly every year since. Daikin Park downtown is the anchor of the east side's revival. The Texans play at NRG Stadium, share it with the Rodeo, and are in a stadium conversation that has been public for two years without resolving. The Rockets are at Toyota Center downtown. The Dynamo and the Dash, the men's and women's soccer clubs, play at Shell Energy Stadium in the East End, which hosted matches during this summer's World Cup alongside NRG. Houston hosted seven World Cup games between June and July, which is a sentence the city will be repeating for a decade.

The stadium map is the development map. Daikin Park, Toyota Center, Shell Energy Stadium, and the George R. Brown Convention Center sit within a mile of each other on the east side of downtown, and EaDo, the district between them, has gone from warehouses to one of the fastest appreciating residential submarkets inside the loop in fifteen years.

Real estate

Three commercial markets and a residential one, and they could not be more different from each other.

Residential is where the correction lives. The HAR August numbers: single family median $330,000, down $5,000 on the year; average $433,000, down 1 percent; 38,947 active listings; 5.3 months of supply; 7,100 closings, down 11.5 percent. The trailing twelve months of sales, at 88,565, is still above the 86,999 sold in all of 2019, and it is worth sitting with that: the metro is selling more houses than it did before the pandemic. National sales are down 20 percent against 2019. Houston is up. The problem is not that nobody is buying. The problem is that everybody is selling.

The segments split cleanly. Homes above $1 million rose 9.4 percent in July. Homes under $150,000 are moving. The middle, $250,000 to $500,000, more than half of all sales, is the softest part of the market, and it is the part that competes directly with new construction in Fort Bend. Townhomes and condos are softer still. Rents are cheap by any big metro standard, around $1,400 to $1,550 for a three bedroom. Affordability, measured against income and rates, has improved on a year over year basis in 22 of the last 25 months. That is what a supply correction looks like from the buyer's side, and it is why the correction is a good thing for the city even as it is a hard year for sellers.

Where the money is, by neighborhood. Old Houston money is in River Oaks, platted by the Hogg brothers in the 1920s and still the most expensive neighborhood in Texas by total value, and in the Memorial Villages, six independent municipalities west of the loop with their own police and no commercial development to speak of. Tanglewood, West University, and Southampton near Rice are the tier just below. These are the neighborhoods where the deed restrictions are strongest, the lots are largest, and the listings are fewest, and they are the part of the county the 130 percent number does not touch.

New Houston money is in the west and north. Katy, on the Fort Bend line, built around Cinco Ranch and the energy executives who wanted a yard. Cypress along 290, with Bridgeland and Towne Lake absorbing more new households this decade than almost anywhere in the state. The Woodlands, just over the county line, where Exxon's campus sits at the southern edge. This is where the relocating engineer with two kids and a company stock plan lands, and it is where most of the county's population growth since 2010 actually went.

Young Houston is inside the loop. The Heights, north of downtown, went from bungalows to the most sought after townhome market in the city in about fifteen years. Montrose, the Museum District, Midtown, and EaDo are where the under 35 professional lives and where the restaurants that made Houston a food city are. Rice Village and Upper Kirby sit between them and the money. These are the submarkets the non zoning built: dense, walkable in a city that is not, and appreciating faster than the median.

Office is the market everyone points at and almost everyone misreads. The headline vacancy is somewhere between 20.6 percent and 27 percent depending on whether you use Colliers' or CoStar's inventory definition, and Houston has carried a number in that range since the 2014 oil bust emptied the Energy Corridor. What the headline hides is a bifurcation wider than anywhere else in Texas. CBRE has trophy vacancy downtown at 4.4 percent against a central business district average of 28.5 percent. Ninety six percent of leases over 10,000 square feet in the first quarter were in Class A buildings. NRG left 479,000 square feet at 910 Louisiana and took 290,000 at 3 Houston Center in the same quarter, which is the whole Houston office story in one move: same tenant, smaller footprint, better building.

Absorption turned positive in 2025 for the first time since 2019, and the first half of 2026 was positive again. New construction is nearly nonexistent, with a handful of buildings underway and two of them fully preleased. The old buildings are being removed from inventory, sold to owner users, or converted. This is a market being slowly rebuilt around a much smaller base of buildings that tenants actually want, and the Fortune 500 relocations landing in suburban campuses rather than downtown towers is why the rebuild is slow. It is also why the buildings that survive it will be worth more.

Industrial is the market nobody points at and it is the best story in the county. CBRE has second quarter net absorption at about 7 million square feet, vacancy down to 6.7 percent, year to date absorption at 11 million, and leasing at 17 million square feet through June. The Northwest submarket alone absorbed 2.3 million square feet in the quarter. There are 17.7 million square feet still in the pipeline and deliveries are 42 percent preleased. This is the port, the petrochemical complex, and the distribution economy of a metro of seven million people, and it is running flat out while office rebuilds and housing corrects. Small bay and manufacturing product runs near 2.5 percent vacancy. If there is a Harris County real estate market where demand exceeds supply, it is this one.

What everything here prices against is the cost of owning it. Texas homeowners insurance premiums are about 117 percent above the national average, and Harris County, with Harvey in the recent record and the Gulf on the doorstep, sits at the expensive end of Texas. The Coastal Texas Project, the $34 billion barrier system the press calls the Ike Dike, was authorized by Congress in 2022 and has received a fraction of its funding since. Until it is built, every property between the ship channel and Galveston Bay is underwriting a storm surge it has seen before. That cost is already in the cap rates. It is not in the headlines, and it is the one thing on this list that money from Washington could fix.

Schools and colleges

Houston ISD is the largest district in Texas and has been run by the state since June 2023, when the Texas Education Agency replaced the elected board with appointed managers and installed Mike Miles as superintendent after years of failing ratings at Wheatley High School. The intervention was extended in 2025 through June 2027. In August, Commissioner Mike Morath said it could end "relatively soon." Miles says after this school year.

The improvement is real and it confirms the direction of this piece. Wheatley, the school whose failures triggered the takeover, carries an A rating now. The district went from dozens of D and F campuses to none in 2025, then five F rated schools in 2026 as the pace of gains slowed. The majority of HISD campuses are now rated A or B. Morath has called it the largest academic improvement at that scale in the country's history. The Chronicle found that college prep course credits accounted for a meaningful share of the ratings gains, and the district's answer is that the courses are state approved and used across Texas; both things can be true, and a district that went from failing to mostly A and B in three years is a different asset for the neighborhoods inside it than the one that was taken over. Miles reports the highest average returning teacher salary in the state at about $83,000 and has a contract through 2030. Three trustees elected on a platform of ending the takeover took their seats in January with no power until the state leaves, which is the transition the exit criteria are designed for.

For a buyer, HISD's recovery is the reason the inner loop's expensive neighborhoods are holding. Bellaire High and Lamar keep West University, Bellaire, and River Oaks in the district rather than in private school, and Carnegie Vanguard and DeBakey are two of the top ranked public high schools in Texas.

Around HISD, the suburban districts are the reason the county's growth went where it went. Katy ISD, straddling the Harris and Fort Bend line with about 95,000 students, is the one relocating executives ask for by name and the reason Cinco Ranch exists. Cypress Fairbanks, the third largest district in the state at about 120,000 students, is why Bridgeland and Towne Lake absorbed what they absorbed. Klein, Tomball, and Spring ISDs cover the north side where Exxon and HPE landed, and Humble ISD holds Kingwood. Clear Creek ISD serves the NASA corridor and is consistently among the highest rated districts in the region. Spring Branch ISD holds the Memorial Villages, with Memorial and Stratford High Schools, and is the closest thing Houston has to Highland Park as a district. River Oaks is the closest thing it has as an address, and River Oaks is in HISD. Same pattern as Dallas: the A rated line is the price line, and Harris County has more A rated districts inside it than any county in the state.

Above the districts: Rice University, one of the wealthiest private universities in the country per student and the research anchor of the Medical Center. The University of Houston, a Tier One research university and a Big 12 member since 2023, with a medical school that opened in 2020 and about 47,000 students. Texas Southern, one of the largest historically black universities in the country. The University of Houston Downtown, Houston Christian, and the University of St. Thomas. Baylor College of Medicine and UT Health inside the Medical Center. And the community college system that actually staffs the port and the plants: Houston Community College, Lone Star College, the largest in the region, and San Jacinto College in Pasadena, whose maritime and petrochemical programs are where the ship channel hires from.

Culture

Houston is the most ethnically diverse large city in the United States by the Rice Kinder Institute's measure and has been for a decade. No group is a majority. About a quarter of residents were born outside the country. The practical result is the best food city in Texas and one of the best in the country: Viet Cajun crawfish invented here, Bellaire's Chinatown, the Mahatma Gandhi District on Hillcroft, a Tex Mex tradition that predates the state, a barbecue scene that now competes with Austin, and a Nigerian, Salvadoran, and Persian restaurant density that no other American city outside New York or Los Angeles matches.

The institutions are larger than the city's reputation. Houston is one of a handful of American cities with permanent resident companies in all four performing arts: the Houston Symphony, Houston Grand Opera, Houston Ballet, and the Alley Theatre, and its Theater District has the second largest concentration of seats in the country after New York. The Museum District holds nineteen museums, including the Museum of Fine Arts, one of the largest in the country, and the Menil Collection, free to enter and among the finest private collections ever assembled. The Rothko Chapel is here. Buffalo Bayou Park runs through the middle of the city and is the model other cities now copy. Hermann Park and the zoo sit between the Museum District and the Medical Center. The Art Car Parade is the strangest annual event in Texas and the most Houston.

None of that shows up in a cap rate. All of it shows up in whether the engineer from California stays after the first summer.

Jobs

Roughly one in three jobs in the metro traces back to oil, gas, refining, petrochemicals, or the transition businesses built on top of them. That is the exposure and it is also the reason this year has been good. The Greater Houston Partnership projects about 30,000 new jobs over the coming year with health care leading. Twenty four Houston area companies made the U.S. News best companies to work for list this year, up from eleven two years ago, a small signal that employers are competing for people rather than shedding them.

The Dallas Fed's statewide caution applies here too. Immigration decline constrains labor supply, and Houston's construction, petrochemical, and port labor forces are more exposed to that than Dallas's finance workforce. The industrial absorption numbers above were built by crews that are harder to hire than they were two years ago, and the steel tariff is in every warehouse frame.

What we would want to see

Houston is the market in this series where the gap between how the county is described and how it is performing is widest, and the direction of the gap is the opportunity. Two sellers for every buyer reads as distress. Twenty seven Fortune 500 headquarters and a twenty eighth on the way, a record port, the largest medical complex in the world, seven World Cup matches, the space program, and 11 million square feet of industrial absorption read as a boom. Both are correct. The residential market got ahead of itself in 2021 and 2022 the same way every Sunbelt market did, the builders in Fort Bend never stopped because nothing in Houston stops them, and now Harris County's older inventory is competing with their product. That is a correction that clears, because the demand underneath it is not going anywhere.

Before committing capital we would want:

• The seller to buyer ratio turning. Not to balance, just turning. Houston's 130 percent is the single clearest signal in Texas that the residential correction has not found its floor, and when it does, the Redfin number will show it first.
• Office absorption positive for a fourth consecutive quarter, with the central business district off its 28 percent. The trophy tier is fine. The question is whether the rest of the inventory shrinks fast enough to matter.
• Industrial vacancy holding under 7 percent as the 17.7 million square foot pipeline delivers. That is the one market in the county where new supply is a risk rather than a relief.
• Expand Energy's move completed and HISD's exit criteria met. The first confirms the headquarters story is still running. The second removes the largest single uncertainty over inner loop residential value, and it is closer than it has been in three years.
• A real appropriation for the Coastal Texas Project. Until the barrier is funded, everything on the east side of the county is priced for a storm.

Houston has the worst listing math in the state and the best economy. The metro is selling more houses than it did in 2019, exporting more of everything than it ever has, running the space program, running the largest medical complex on earth, and adding headquarters that had no cost reason to come. The correction is in the listings. The city is fine. Those are different things, and the price of the first is the opportunity in the second. Of the five counties we have written about, this is the one we live in, and it is the one we would buy first.

This is general commentary about a real estate submarket. It is not advice, not a recommendation, and not an offer to buy or sell anything. See the disclosures page.