Bexar County, September 2026

Every other big Texas metro is working off a hangover this year. Houston has two sellers for every buyer. Austin's median is a fifth below its 2022 peak. Dallas is holding but soft. San Antonio's median sale price in August was just over $299,000, exactly where it was in August 2025, and sales rose from a year earlier while they fell across the state and the country.

The reason is that San Antonio never had the party. Prices here went up in 2021 and 2022 like everywhere else, but from a lower base and by less, and the money that chased Austin and the Hill Country mostly drove past Bexar County on Interstate 35. So there is less to give back. The county is the fourth largest in the state at about 2.16 million people, the city is the seventh largest in the country, and for most of the last decade it has grown steadily without ever being the story.

This year it has a story. Toyota is spending $3.6 billion to double its plant on the south side and move Tacoma production here from Mexico. The Spurs went to the NBA Finals and the city is fighting over whether to pay for their new arena. And the job base that has always kept the place steady, the military and the hospitals, is doing what it always does while the rest of Texas figures out its labor supply.

Where the county line falls

Most of San Antonio's economy is inside Bexar County, which makes it more like Houston than Dallas in that respect. Joint Base San Antonio is all in the county: Lackland on the west side, Randolph on the northeast, Fort Sam Houston near downtown. The Toyota plant is in the south. Port San Antonio, the old Kelly Air Force Base, is southwest of downtown. The Medical Center, USAA, Valero, H E B, and the Pearl are all inside the line.

The growth that leaves the county goes north and east. New Braunfels and the rest of Comal County have been among the fastest growing in the country for a decade. Boerne and Kendall County pull the executives who work in the north side office parks. Schertz and Cibolo straddle the Guadalupe County line. The pattern is the same as everywhere else in Texas: the county holds the employers and the older housing, the counties next door get the new subdivisions and the families with two incomes.

The military

San Antonio calls itself Military City USA and has the numbers to back it. Joint Base San Antonio is the largest joint base in the Department of Defense, with something on the order of 80,000 military personnel, civilians, and contractors across its three main installations. Lackland is where every Air Force enlistee goes through basic training. Randolph trains the pilots who train the pilots. Fort Sam Houston holds Brooke Army Medical Center, the military's largest hospital and its only Level I trauma center, and the medical training campus that produces most of the enlisted medics in every branch.

The cybersecurity piece is newer and matters more every year. Sixteenth Air Force, the service's information warfare command, is at Lackland. So is a large NSA facility. Port San Antonio has built an aerospace and cyber cluster around that base of talent, with Boeing, StandardAero, and General Dynamics doing aircraft maintenance and a growing set of defense contractors doing the work nobody describes in press releases. Port San Antonio is now one of the largest employment centers in the region and the one the city's economic development people talk about first.

The point for a county reader is that this payroll does not move with oil, rates, or migration. It moves with the federal budget, which cut San Antonio's federal workforce late last year and then stabilized. The metro added 7,000 jobs between November and February, a 2.4 percent annualized pace, led by education and health care. Unemployment sat at 4.1 percent, under the state.

Toyota

On July 6 Toyota announced it will invest $3.6 billion to add a second assembly line at its San Antonio plant for the Tacoma pickup, creating 2,000 jobs and adding 2.5 million square feet, which doubles the plant by 2030. The Tacoma is currently built in Baja California. Production moves to Texas over about four years.

Read that carefully, because it is the reverse of the nearshoring story everyone has been telling. This is not a company moving production from Asia to Mexico to be closer to the American market. It is a company moving production from Mexico to Texas. The plant already builds the Tundra and the Sequoia and has since 2006, with a supplier park on site that employs thousands more. The expansion makes it one of the largest auto assembly operations in the country, and it lands in the part of the county with the most room to build and the least expensive housing in the metro.

Tariffs are the obvious reason and Toyota did not say so. The company said workforce and long term growth. Whatever the reason, 2,000 assembly jobs at a plant that already has a supplier ecosystem is the single largest private investment announcement in the county's history, and it went to the south side, which has never had one.

The listed companies, and the ones that are not

San Antonio's corporate base is smaller than the other three big metros and more concentrated. Two Fortune 500 companies are headquartered here: Valero, one of the largest refiners in the world, and USAA, the insurer and bank for military families, which employs about 19,000 people in the county and is private. Cullen/Frost Bankers, the largest Texas based bank, is here. So are Rackspace and iHeartMedia, both public. NuStar was acquired by Sunoco in 2024 and its headquarters is winding down.

The largest private employer in the county is H E B, which is headquartered downtown, operates 455 stores across Texas and northern Mexico, employs about 175,000 people, and is owned by the Butt family and its employees. This year it proposed a $700 million expansion of its manufacturing and distribution complex on the east side, adding a bakery, a refrigerated warehouse, and 720 jobs by 2028. Whataburger moved here from Corpus Christi in 2009. SWBC, Bill Miller, and a handful of others round it out.

Greater SATX, the regional economic development group, said in January it is going to pursue corporate headquarters harder over the next five years because Austin, Dallas, and Houston are all ahead. That is true and it is also the honest description of the county's position: a very large, stable economy built on institutions rather than public companies. The city's own comprehensive plan says it plainly. Tourism, health care, the military, and education generated 80 percent of new jobs over a twelve year stretch and pay about 20 percent below the county average. San Antonio's problem has never been jobs. It has been wages.

Real estate

Residential is the calmest of the four big metros and it is worth being specific about what calm means. The SABOR area median in August was just above $299,000, flat on the year. Inventory is just under six months. Homes are sitting about 82 days, up from a year ago. Two thirds of sales fall between $200,000 and $499,000. Inside Bexar County the median closing was $281,500 on a thousand transactions, at 97.7 percent of list, which means the typical seller takes about $6,500 off asking. The gap between what standing inventory is asking and what closed homes are getting is about $28,000. Sellers who price to the second number sell. Sellers who price to the first sit.

Two things run against the calm. Redfin has San Antonio's contract cancellation rate at 18.7 percent, third highest in the country behind Jacksonville and Houston. And property taxes in Bexar County run 1.8 to 2.2 percent depending on the district, which on a $290,000 house is $435 to $530 a month before insurance. The house is cheap. Owning it is not as cheap as the sticker suggests.

New construction is concentrated in Converse on the east side, far west Bexar toward Medina County, and New Braunfels outside the county. The northeast corridor around Stone Oak and the Medical Center hold value best. The south and east sides carry the heaviest inventory and the lowest prices, and the Toyota expansion lands in the middle of them.

Office is recovering faster here than in Houston or Austin. CBRE had metro vacancy at 19.6 percent in the first quarter, down from a multiyear high of 22.7 in early 2025, on 179,000 square feet of absorption. There is no new office construction. Industrial vacancy is 11.6 percent, higher than Houston's 6.7, with about 20 million square feet vacant, but absorption was positive in the first quarter and the nearshoring leases, including Nippon Express at 211,000 square feet, are the ones getting signed. The metro's total construction starts are projected at $12.6 billion this year, and the constraint the builders name is skilled labor, not demand.

Project Marvel and the Spurs

The Spurs went to the NBA Finals in June against the Knicks, with Victor Wembanyama the unanimous Defensive Player of the Year and the Western Conference Finals MVP at 22 years old. It was the franchise's first Finals appearance since 2014 and it happened in the middle of the city's biggest civic fight in years.

Project Marvel is a proposed downtown sports and entertainment district anchored by a new Spurs arena, priced at about $1.3 billion for the arena and more for the district around it: a convention center expansion, an Alamodome renovation, and mixed use development on the east side of downtown. The Spurs put in $500 million. Bexar County voters approved $311 million in 2025, and the county will also retrofit the Frost Bank Center into a year round home for the Stock Show and Rodeo. The city's share is $489 million.

The city's share is the fight. Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones, citing a $158 million deficit in the coming budget and an affordability crisis, pushed to put the $489 million on the November ballot. On August 17 the council voted 6 to 5 against a public vote, which clears the way for the city to finalize its financing under the framework negotiated last year. Sean Elliott spoke for the Spurs. The mayor's side called it paying twice and voting once. The council majority pointed out that city residents already voted as county residents. The city has spent $30 million on land already.

For a county reader, the arena matters less than the district. The east side of downtown, between the Alamodome and the convention center, has been the part of the core that development skipped. Whether Project Marvel gets built as proposed or in some smaller form, the land the city is assembling is the land that decides whether downtown San Antonio grows east or keeps stopping at the river.

Schools and colleges

The University of Texas at San Antonio is the anchor now. It merged with UT Health San Antonio last year into a single institution with about 40,000 students, a medical school, a health science center, and a research budget that puts it in the conversation with UTD and UH. Trinity University, small and private and consistently ranked among the best in the region, sits north of downtown. St. Mary's, Incarnate Word, Our Lady of the Lake, and Texas A&M San Antonio on the south side fill out a college base that is larger than people expect. The Alamo Colleges are the community college system, and Southwest Research Institute, one of the largest independent research organizations in the country, is on the west side with 1,500 acres of laboratories.

At the district level, Northside ISD is the largest in the region at over 100,000 students and covers most of the growth on the northwest side. North East ISD covers Stone Oak and the northeast corridor and is the district families with options tend to choose. Alamo Heights ISD, three small municipalities inside the loop, is the premium address, the same role Highland Park plays in Dallas and the Memorial Villages play in Houston, and priced accordingly. Boerne and Comal ISDs are where the county's growth goes when it leaves.

Culture

San Antonio is the largest majority Hispanic city in the country, about two thirds, and the only big Texas metro where that has been true for its whole history rather than a recent development. The Alamo is here and is in the middle of a $550 million redevelopment with a new visitor center and museum opening in 2027. The River Walk draws more visitors than any attraction in Texas. The five Spanish missions along the river are the state's only UNESCO World Heritage site. Fiesta in April runs eleven days and draws three and a half million people. The Pearl, the old brewery north of downtown, became the model for adaptive reuse in Texas and is where the city's restaurant scene lives now. The breakfast taco was, depending on who you ask, invented here, and the argument with Austin over that is the most San Antonio thing about San Antonio.

Tourism is one of the four base industries and it pays the way the plan says it does. It is also the reason the downtown fight is a fight: the convention center, the Alamodome, and the arena are all tourism infrastructure, and the city is deciding how much more of it to build.

What we would want to see

San Antonio is the metro in this series with the least to correct and the least to prove. Prices are flat, sales are up, unemployment is under the state, and the two largest employers in the county are the federal government and a grocery chain that has never had a bad year. It is also the metro with the lowest wages, the highest property tax burden relative to home price, and a corporate base that its own development agency says is too thin.

Before committing capital we would want:

• The Toyota expansion breaking ground on schedule and the supplier park growing with it. Two thousand jobs on the south side changes what the south side is worth, and the timeline is four years.
• The contract cancellation rate off 18.7 percent. Flat prices with one in five deals falling through is not a stable market. It is a market where buyers are still nervous about payments.
• Project Marvel's city financing finalized, or formally reduced. Either outcome lets the east side of downtown be underwritten. The current state, approved but contested, does not.
• Office vacancy holding under 20 percent with no new construction. San Antonio is the only big Texas metro where that sentence is currently true, and it should stay true for a while.
• Federal employment stable. The cuts late last year were absorbed. A second round would not be, because there is no other employer in the county that size.

San Antonio does not get written about because nothing dramatic happens here, and that is the case for it. The rest of Texas is finding out this year what a correction feels like. Bexar County is finding out what it feels like to be the place that skipped one.

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.

Sources

• San Antonio Board of Realtors, August 2026 market report, via Texas Public Radio
• SABOR and LERA MLS, Bexar County single family closings, August 2026
• Redfin, contract cancellation rates by metro, July 2026
• Toyota Motor North America, San Antonio expansion announcement, July 6, 2026
• The Real Deal, KENS 5, and San Antonio Report, Project Marvel coverage, August 2026
• CBRE Research via the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, San Antonio office and industrial, first quarter 2026
• Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, San Antonio New Braunfels metro profile
• Greater SATX Regional Economic Partnership, SATX360 newsletter, June 2026
• United States Census Bureau, Bexar County and San Antonio population estimates, 2025
• H E B, east side manufacturing and distribution expansion, 2026
• City of San Antonio, SA Tomorrow Comprehensive Plan, economic base industries
• Engineering News Record, San Antonio construction outlook, December 2025

This piece is subject to the site disclosures.

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.

Sources

• Houston Association of Realtors, August 2026 Housing Market Update
• Greater Houston Partnership, Economy at a Glance and Monthly Update on Home Sales, 2026
• Redfin, sellers versus buyers and contract cancellation data, July and August 2026
• Port Houston, first quarter and first half 2026 releases, and 2025 annual results
• CBRE, Houston Office Figures, first quarter 2026, and Houston Industrial Figures, second quarter 2026
• Colliers, Houston Office Market Report, second quarter 2026
• Coy Davidson, Texas Office Market Snapshot, second quarter 2026
• Fortune 500, 2026 list, and Greater Houston Partnership headquarters count
• Texas Education Agency, Houston ISD intervention extension and 2026 A through F ratings
• Houston Chronicle and Houston Public Media, Houston ISD coverage, August 2026
• Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Texas homeowners insurance research, 2026
• Texas Medical Center, NASA Johnson Space Center, Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, and Rice University Kinder Institute, institutional facts
• City of Houston, Planning and Development Department, on land use and deed restrictions

This piece is subject to the site disclosures.

In the second quarter of this year, 55.8 million tons of cargo moved through the Corpus Christi Ship Channel. It was the best quarter in the port's 99 year history, and it broke the record set the quarter before. The first half of 2026 came in 7.7 percent ahead of the first half of 2025, with liquefied natural gas up 36 percent and agricultural exports up from 189,000 tons to 2.1 million.

Twelve miles up the Nueces River, Lake Corpus Christi and Choke Canyon Reservoir, the two lakes that hold three quarters of the city's water supply, sat at a combined 8 percent of capacity through the spring. Choke Canyon was at 47 percent in October 2021. The city has banned lawn watering since 2023, cancelled its billion dollar desalination plant last September, had its credit outlook cut to negative by Fitch in April, and has been told by its own engineers that a Level 1 water emergency, the first ever declared by an American city of this size, is a matter of when.

Both of those paragraphs are true of the same place in the same year. That is Corpus Christi, and anyone underwriting Nueces County has to hold both at once.

The port

Start with what it is, because the scale is easy to underrate from Houston. The Port of Corpus Christi is the third largest port in the United States by tonnage. It is the largest crude oil export gateway in the country and the third largest in the world, behind only Russia and Saudi Arabia, moving more than 2.4 million barrels a day to foreign buyers. It is the second largest LNG export gateway in the United States. Trade through it was worth about $89 billion in 2024. In a decade it went from about 85 million tons a year to more than 200 million, and nearly all of that growth is one thing: Congress lifted the crude export ban in December 2015, the Permian pipelines converged here rather than at Houston, and the port built the channel to receive them.

That channel is the piece of infrastructure that changed the trajectory. The Channel Improvement Project, conceived more than thirty years ago and finished in June 2025, deepened the ship channel from 47 feet to 54 and widened it from 400 feet to 530, with barge shelves on either side. Cost was about $625 million, split between the port, Congress, and the Army Corps. What it buys is very large crude carriers loading at the dock instead of lightering offshore, and two way traffic where there used to be one. The port's own estimate is that exporters save more than $200 million a year in transportation cost. The new Harbor Bridge, which replaced a 1959 span with a cable stayed bridge tall enough to clear the vessels the deeper channel invites, went into service alongside it.

The 2026 numbers are the first full year with both in place, and the mix is what to read. Crude, the dominant commodity, was up only 1.3 percent in the first half. The growth came from everything else: LNG up 36 percent to 11.5 million tons, refined products up 9 percent, natural gas liquids up 18 percent, other bulk liquids up 12 percent, and agriculture up more than tenfold. The port CEO has said publicly that the next thing he is looking at is container service, which Corpus Christi has never handled, and that the constraint on crude is now pipeline capacity from West Texas rather than dock capacity here. Two of the three main lines are expandable.

Now put the Middle East next to it. The Strait of Hormuz has been running at a fraction of normal flow since the Iran conflict began. Saudi Arabia shut its East West pipeline after attacks this month and has cut crude shipments to Europe. Every barrel that does not leave the Gulf is a barrel Europe and Asia buy from somewhere else, and the somewhere else with a 54 foot channel, VLCC docks, and six million barrels a day of Permian supply behind it is this one. The Q2 record was set before most of that happened. Q3 will not be smaller.

What is across the bay

Here is the county lens, and it matters more in Corpus than anywhere else we have written about.

Nueces County holds the city, the port headquarters, the three refineries on the Inner Harbor run by Valero, Citgo, and Flint Hills, the Naval Air Station, the universities, and, since January, the Tesla lithium refinery in Robstown. What it does not hold is most of the new industrial buildout. Cheniere's Corpus Christi Liquefaction, the LNG plant whose Stage 3 expansion is the reason LNG tonnage is up 36 percent, sits in San Patricio County across the bay. So does the ExxonMobil and SABIC ethylene cracker at Gregory, the Steel Dynamics mill at Sinton, and the Enbridge crude terminal at Ingleside, which loads more crude than any single terminal in the country. The port's growth story is largely a San Patricio story that clears customs through a Nueces County channel.

Nueces County has no public company headquarters of any size. Whataburger was founded here in 1950 and moved to San Antonio in 2009. The refineries answer to San Antonio, Houston, and Wichita. Cheniere answers to Houston, Tesla to Austin, Enbridge to Calgary. This is a county where other people's capital works, and where the profits on that capital are booked somewhere else. What stays local is payroll, property tax, and water demand.

The Tesla plant is the exception worth watching. It broke ground in Robstown in May 2023, went operational in January, and reached full integrated capacity in February: the first facility in North America to take hard rock spodumene concentrate, most of it Australian and landed through the port, and convert it to battery grade lithium hydroxide on one site. It ships to Giga Texas by rail. It employs about 400 people. It also needs water in a county that has none to spare, and the water contract it signed with the South Texas Water Authority was the subject of a public fight before the plant opened.

Water

This is the headwind, and it is not a footnote.

Corpus Christi Water serves about 500,000 people across seven counties and one of the largest industrial corridors in the country. Its supply comes from three places: the two Nueces basin reservoirs, and a pipeline system that brings water from Lake Texana and the Colorado River. The reservoirs are the base. They have been in decline since late 2021, when Choke Canyon was at 47 percent, and they reached 7.8 percent combined on May 1 of this year. Rain in May and June moved Lake Corpus Christi up meaningfully; Choke Canyon, the larger of the two and the one that matters, barely moved. Combined storage sits around 8.5 percent, well below the 20 percent that triggered Stage 3 restrictions in the first place. The pipeline system, which was built as a supplement, now supplies about 73 percent of the city's water.

The city's engineers projected in the spring that the system would hit the 180 day supply threshold that triggers a Level 1 Water Emergency by this September. The rains pushed that projection out, to 2027 at the earliest by most accounts. A Level 1 emergency means mandatory cuts for every user, industrial customers included, enforced by surcharges the city is not sure it can legally impose on its largest accounts, ten of which are permanently exempt under their contracts. Nobody has done this before. The city manager told council there is no manual.

The solution everyone agreed on was seawater desalination. The city spent a decade courting industrial customers on the promise of an Inner Harbor plant that would deliver 30 million gallons a day by 2028, most of it for industry. The cost estimate went from $757 million to $1.3 billion. Last September the council killed it. In June, after a fifteen hour meeting, it voted 7 to 2 to delay a decision on reviving it. Moody's downgraded the city in December. Fitch cut its outlook to negative in April. Both cited drought supply risk and the unfunded cost of doing something about it. The governor criticized the city's handling publicly and ordered state agencies to suspend normal procedures to buy time.

What is actually being built: Nueces River groundwater wells supplying about 12 million gallons a day, at pumping rates the aquifer cannot sustain for years. A reclaimed water project delivering its first million gallons a day next month. And a privately owned desalination plant at Corpus Christi Polymers, permitted and nearly complete, from which the city is now negotiating to buy water. The city has approved about $1 billion in financing toward 76 million gallons a day of new capacity across all of it, but none of it is in service yet, and the former chief operating officer of Corpus Christi Water, who resigned when the desal plant died, put it plainly: curtailment ends when the weather changes or a large new supply arrives, and there is no large new supply lined up.

For a real estate reader the translation is direct. Every industrial customer on the corridor signed a water contract assuming the desal plant. Every one of them is now a party to a curtailment plan that does not exist yet. And the city's cost of borrowing to fix it just went up twice.

Real estate

Corpus Christi is a buyer's market and has been for a year. The city median sale price was about $295,000 in April, flat to slightly down, with homes sitting 73 days against 61 a year earlier and more than eight months of inventory. About 37 percent of active listings have cut price. Two thirds of sales are closing below list. Zillow's home value index for the city is about $219,000, down 1.4 percent on the year. The metro average, which includes Aransas and San Patricio, was about $342,000 in May 2025, down from $378,000 the year before.

Two structural facts underneath that. First, this is a slow growth labor market by Texas standards. Between 2012 and 2023 the metro's labor force grew less than one percent while the state's grew 19 percent, and unemployment has run roughly a point above the state for years. The $28 billion in industrial projects announced over the last five years did not translate into population the way the same money would in Houston, because the plants are capital intensive and the construction labor commutes. Second, prices ran anyway: the city median rose 96 percent from 2012 to 2023 against 75 percent nationally. A flat labor force and a near doubling in price is a market that got ahead of its own economy, and the eight months of inventory is that gap closing.

Homeownership in the county is about 60 percent and median household income about $54,000, which puts a median priced home out of reach for a median family at current rates. Rents around $1,400 are cheap by Texas standards. The submarkets that hold value are the ones the water problem touches least and the schools touch most: the Southside along Yorktown and Saratoga inside London ISD, the Island across the causeway, Flour Bluff, and Calallen to the northwest. The Northside and the corridor along the refineries do not.

Schools and institutions

Texas A&M University Corpus Christi, the Island University, sits on its own island in Corpus Christi Bay and is the largest degree granting institution in the county, with programs in marine science, engineering, and nursing that feed the port and the hospitals directly. Del Mar College is the community college and the workforce pipeline for the plants; its welding and process technology programs are what the industrial employers actually hire from. Together they awarded about 4,800 degrees in 2024, roughly nine tenths of the county's total.

The Navy is the institution people forget. Naval Air Station Corpus Christi trains Navy, Marine, and Coast Guard pilots and hosts the Corpus Christi Army Depot, the largest helicopter repair facility in the world and one of the largest civilian employers in South Texas. That payroll does not move with oil prices, which is the only thing in the county that can say so.

At the district level, London ISD south of the city is the one buyers pay for, a small A rated district that has become the Southside's price anchor the way Highland Park is Dallas's. Flour Bluff and Calallen are the next tier. Port Aransas ISD is tiny and strong. Corpus Christi ISD is large, mixed, and carries the weight of the city's average GreatSchools rating of four out of ten. As in Dallas, the price gap between the A rated districts and the rest is the clearest map of where value sits in the county.

What would change the picture

Corpus Christi is the purest version of the Texas thesis in this series: the state as the world's marginal energy supplier, with the world's marginal energy demand routed through one 54 foot channel. It is also the clearest case of a place whose growth is capped by something it cannot ship in. The port can move 55 million tons a quarter. It cannot move a reservoir.

Before committing capital we would want:

• A large water supply under contract. The Corpus Christi Polymers desal purchase, a revived Inner Harbor plant, or an executed regional pipeline expansion. Not planned. Signed. Everything else in this county prices off that document.
• Choke Canyon above 20 percent, which is the Stage 3 threshold, or a Level 1 emergency declared and survived. Either resolves the question. Living between them does not.
• Fitch and Moody's back to stable. The city's borrowing cost is the cost of every solution, and two agencies just said it is going the wrong way.
• Container service announced, or a pipeline expansion financed. The port's next leg of growth is not crude, and either announcement would say the diversification is real rather than aspirational.
• Inventory below six months in the Southside and on the Island. That is where the county's residential value lives, and eight months means the correction is still running.

The port is the best story on the Texas coast. The water is the most serious infrastructure failure in the state. They share a city council, a tax base, and an aquifer. We will keep reading this one closely, because the day the water is solved is the day the port's numbers start meaning what they appear to mean.

Sources

• Port of Corpus Christi, quarterly tonnage releases and Channel Improvement Project completion announcement, 2025 and 2026
• Corpus Christi Caller Times and KRIS 6 News, port and water crisis reporting, 2026
• Texas Tribune, Corpus Christi water emergency coverage, March 2026
• CNN, Inside Climate News, and Texas Observer, Corpus Christi water supply reporting, 2026
• City of Corpus Christi Water Supply Dashboard, reservoir levels
• Fitch Ratings and Moody's, City of Corpus Christi rating actions, December 2025 and April 2026
• Texas Real Estate Research Center, Corpus Christi employment and housing affordability studies, 2025 and 2026
• Movoto and Zillow, Corpus Christi market data, 2026
• United States Census Bureau, American Community Survey, Nueces County
• Electrek, Spectrum News, and KRIS 6, Tesla Robstown lithium refinery, 2025 and 2026
• MarineLink, Port of Corpus Christi profile, May 2026

This piece is subject to the site disclosures.

On July 22 the Texas grid set an all time record. Demand peaked at 91.1 gigawatts, six gigawatts above the 2023 record that had stood for three summers, and the system met it with natural gas supplying about 48 percent and solar about 32 percent. No emergency was declared. ERCOT has now broken its own record several times this summer without so much as a conservation alert, which is not what anyone predicted after the winter of 2021.

That same week, the Strait of Hormuz was running at roughly a fifth of its normal flow, Saudi Arabia's East West pipeline was days from being shut by attacks, and the diesel crack spread in the United States was on its way to $106 a barrel, a number it had never touched. Corpus Christi was loading crude at a pace above 2.4 million barrels a day and Golden Pass was ramping its second LNG train on the upper coast.

Those two facts describe the same place. Texas is where the world is buying energy it cannot get elsewhere, and Texas is where power demand is growing faster than anywhere in the country. The state is the marginal supplier abroad and the marginal buyer at home, at the same moment, and both of those roles are being tested this fall by things it does not control.

This piece is about the whole state, so it carries no pin. It is the frame the county pieces sit inside.

The demand side: power

The 91.1 gigawatt peak is the fact to start from because it is the one that has changed the most. ERCOT's peak load grew about six gigawatts a year in 2022 and 2023, a pace that strained the system and sent wholesale prices to the cap for hours at a stretch. It grew another six this summer, and the system barely noticed. About 53 gigawatts of solar capacity is installed in Texas now, up from almost nothing a decade ago, and on the day of the record, solar was producing 35 gigawatts at the moment it mattered. The afternoon peak has been solved. The evening ramp and the winter are the remaining questions.

What is behind the growth is not air conditioning. It is the interconnection queue. As of the governor's August 3 letter, ERCOT was evaluating roughly 474 gigawatts of requests to connect to the grid, more than five times the record it had just set, and about 90 percent of those requests were data centers. The Texas Tribune counts at least 596 data centers operating or planned across the state. ERCOT's own preliminary long term forecast, filed in April, projects something like 368 gigawatts of demand by 2032 if every requested load materializes. ERCOT does not believe that number, and said so in the filing. Its working assumption is a peak somewhere around 98 to 112 gigawatts within a few years, which would still be the fastest load growth of any grid in the country.

Then the governor stepped in. On August 3, citing data centers that had failed to comply with a state survey of their water and power use, Abbott directed the Public Utility Commission and ERCOT to audit every data center in the interconnection process before any additional project advances, and to deny grid access to any that fail. ERCOT paused its Batch Zero study, the first structured review of large load requests, and said it would complete the audit of roughly 300 proposals by December. Projects already under construction with contracted in service dates are now waiting on a state review with no fixed timeline. Lawyers representing the industry are telling developers to reread their force majeure clauses.

The audit is a headwind and it is also a filter. Most of the 474 gigawatts was never going to be built; a queue that size is mostly developers reserving optionality. What comes out of the audit in December is the first real number for how much of it is serious, and that number is worth more to anyone underwriting Texas power, land, or transmission than any forecast published before it.

The supply side: everything else

The Iran conflict took something like a fifth of the world's LNG and a comparable share of seaborne crude off the market, depending on the week and which strait was passable. The United States is the largest producer of both, and Texas is where most of it leaves.

Corpus Christi handled 54.5 million tons in the first quarter, the strongest quarter in the port's history, with crude exports above 2.4 million barrels a day in March and LNG volumes up about a third on the year. The port's CEO put LNG shipments up 40 percent by late spring. Golden Pass, the ExxonMobil and QatarEnergy terminal at Sabine Pass, sent its first cargo to Italy in April and was expected to have its second train running by early fall. Cheniere's Corpus Christi expansion has been bringing its seven smaller trains online through the year. National LNG export capacity goes from about 17 billion cubic feet a day at the end of last year to more than 19 this year, and nearly all of the increase is on the Texas coast.

Refining is where the squeeze is most visible. Roughly a third of American refining capacity sits between Beaumont and Corpus Christi. With global diesel supply short, the margin on turning a barrel of crude into a barrel of diesel hit a record $106 on September 1, having more than tripled since February. Retail diesel is at $6.20 a gallon nationally. Distillate inventories are at their lowest level for the season since the 1950s because product is being exported to cover the global gap, and the White House called four large refiners in to discuss it, three of them headquartered in Texas.

The Permian is producing around six million barrels a day, more than all but a handful of countries. The state's oil and gas severance taxes will have a very good year.

That is the supplier of last resort. It is also a state where the person hauling cotton off the High Plains is paying $6.20 at the pump, and the money moves from one end of the invoice to the other inside the same border. Record margin at the refinery gate. Record cost at every gate after it.

What is pulling the other way

Four things, in order of how much they matter to anyone deploying capital in Texas this year.

Interest rates. At the start of 2026 the market priced four rate cuts by the middle of next year. It now prices four hikes. That is a 200 basis point swing in expectations inside nine months, driven by the oil shock feeding into inflation prints, and the Fed meets on Wednesday with a hike at better than even odds. The 10 year Treasury is at its highest since last October. Two weeks ago the Treasury Department began buying back long dated bonds, funded with bill issuance, in an explicit attempt to hold the long end down.

For Texas real estate the mechanics are specific. Mortgages and cap rates price off the 10 year, so a policy that pins the long end while the short end rises does not necessarily push home loan rates up. But every builder in the state offering a temporary rate buydown, which is most of them in Katy, Cypress, Dripping Springs, and the Austin suburbs, is funding that buydown off the short end. The discounts that have been holding new home sales together got more expensive to give, and they got more expensive the week before the meeting.

Labor. The Dallas Fed's forecast for Texas job growth started the year at 1.9 percent and has drifted toward 1.1. The reasons it gives are declining immigration constraining labor supply, productivity gains suppressing demand for workers, and softening in its own business surveys. National labor force participation fell to a five year low this month. Texas has outgrown the state forecast in the metros, with Dallas running above 3 percent annualized in June, but the ceiling is lower than it was, and the sectors most exposed to the immigration decline, construction and agriculture, are the same sectors that build the houses and harvest the cotton.

Housing. The three big metros are in three different places, and the state as a whole is a buyer's market. Houston has 130 percent more sellers than buyers by Redfin's count and the second highest contract cancellation rate of any metro in the country at 19.6 percent. Austin's median is a fifth below its 2022 peak with net domestic outflow from Travis County two years running. Dallas Fort Worth is the exception, with inventory tightening while everyone else's loosens, and prices down only 1.7 percent on the year. Nationally, new homes priced below existing homes this spring for the first time on record, and that inversion is a Texas suburb phenomenon showing up in the national median. None of this is collapse. All of it is the end of the 2021 to 2022 story, and the state has more houses than it has buyers for at current rates.

The cost of owning anything here. Texas homeowners insurance premiums rose about 60 percent between 2019 and 2024, double the national increase, and the average Texas homeowner now pays roughly $4,585 a year, more than twice the national figure. The pace has slowed sharply, from 18.7 percent growth in 2024 to 4.3 percent in 2025 by the Texas Department of Insurance's count, as reinsurance prices ease. But building costs have not: tariffs have raised material prices and immigration enforcement has raised construction wages, and both flow into replacement cost, which is what a premium is priced on. The state's answer on the tax side, a $140,000 homestead exemption up from $100,000, is real relief for the median homeowner and none at all for a landlord.

Two smaller ones worth naming. The governor's audit is a governance risk as much as a power one; Texas has never before paused an entire category of grid connections by executive letter, and the precedent is now set. And the state is a party to a trade war it did not start: Texas is the largest exporting state in the country, Mexico is its largest partner, and Canada is a top destination for most states' goods. Tariff escalation with either lands here before it lands anywhere else.

What would change the picture

The state is not a single trade. But every county piece we publish sits inside these conditions, and the conditions are what we would watch before deploying anywhere in Texas this year.

• The audit finishing by December with a real number. Whatever fraction of the 474 gigawatts survives verification is the first honest measure of Texas data center demand. Everything published before it is a developer's reservation, not a forecast.
• The Fed's path settling. Four hikes priced is a market guess, not a plan. A Fed that hikes Wednesday and signals a pause is a different environment from one that hikes and keeps going, and Texas real estate cannot be underwritten until the difference is known.
• Texas job growth back above 1.5 percent in the Dallas Fed's forecast. The metros are carrying the state. If the state number keeps drifting down while the metros hold, the gap is rural Texas and the sectors that depend on immigrant labor, and that is where the damage will show first.
• Houston's seller to buyer ratio turning. Not to balance, just turning. It is the single clearest signal that the housing correction in the state's largest metro has found its floor.
• Golden Pass trains two and three on schedule, and Corpus Christi Stage 3 complete. The export story is real but it is a construction story until the terminals are done, and construction in Texas right now is short of workers and paying tariff prices for steel.

Texas is not exposed to this crisis. Texas is the other side of it. That has been true of every energy shock since 1973 and it is true now, and it cuts both ways: the state earns more from the world's shortage than any other place on earth, and it pays more for its own consumption than it did a year ago, and it is doing both while building more power demand than any grid in the country has ever had to absorb. Those are not contradictions. They are the job description.

Sources

• Electric Reliability Council of Texas, summer 2026 operations data and preliminary long term load forecast, April 2026
• U.S. Energy Information Administration, ERCOT peak demand reports, August and September 2026
• Office of the Governor of Texas, letter to PUCT and ERCOT directing data center audit, August 3, 2026
• Texas Tribune, data center inventory and audit coverage, August and September 2026
• Port of Corpus Christi, first quarter 2026 tonnage and export release
• Golden Pass LNG and Cheniere Energy, project and cargo announcements, 2026
• Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Texas Employment Forecast, Texas homeowners insurance research, and Dallas Economic Indicators, 2026
• Texas Department of Insurance, homeowners premium growth data via the Dallas Fed
• Bloomberg, U.S. diesel crack spread and retail diesel price reporting, September 2026
• Redfin, home purchase cancellation and seller to buyer ratio data, July 2026
• CME FedWatch and Treasury Department buyback announcements, August and September 2026
• Texas Comptroller, homestead exemption changes effective 2026

This piece is subject to the site disclosures.

Here is a number the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas published in July that most people in New York would not believe. The share of total employment in financial activities is higher in Dallas, at 10.1 percent, than in New York City, at 9.9 percent. Higher than Boston at 9.6, Chicago at 6.9, San Francisco at 6.5. The sector employed 317,000 people in the Dallas metro division in June, more than any other Texas metro, and the wider Dallas Fort Worth region counts about 380,000, second in the country behind New York and ahead of Chicago.

That is the county's real business. Everything the country associates with the word Dallas, the football, the oil money, the television show, is somewhere else or long gone. What is actually inside the county line is a finance and corporate headquarters economy that has been building for a decade and is about to get several thousand more desks.

Where Dallas actually is

Start with a fact that surprises people who do not live here. The Dallas Cowboys have not played a home game in Dallas County since 1970. They moved to Irving in 1971, which is still in the county, and then to Arlington in 2009, which is not. The Texas Rangers have been in Arlington since 1972. FC Dallas plays in Frisco, in Collin County, where the Cowboys also keep their headquarters. And in June the Dallas Stars announced they will leave downtown for Plano when their lease ends in 2031.

Toyota's North American headquarters is in Plano. Charles Schwab and Fidelity are in Westlake, in Denton and Tarrant counties. American Airlines is in Fort Worth. Keurig Dr Pepper is in Frisco. When the national press writes about companies moving to Dallas, roughly half the time the company is moving to a suburb in a different county.

None of this is a complaint. It is the shape of the place. The brand sprawls across four counties and the money concentrates in one. For anyone underwriting Dallas County specifically, that distinction is the whole job.

The listed companies

Dallas County has one of the deepest public company bases of any county in the country, and most of it sits in two places: the central city, and Irving.

Irving first, because it is underrated. The Las Colinas corridor near the airport holds McKesson, which moved from San Francisco in 2019 and sits near the top of the Fortune 500 by revenue. Caterpillar, which moved from Illinois in 2022. Kimberly Clark. Fluor. Vistra, the largest competitive power generator in the country. Celanese. Commercial Metals. Builders FirstSource. That is eight large public companies in one suburb, and several of them arrived in the last seven years.

In the city itself: AT&T, headquartered downtown since 2008. Texas Instruments, founded here and still here. Southwest Airlines at Love Field. CBRE, the largest commercial real estate services firm in the world, which moved from Los Angeles in 2020. Energy Transfer. Tenet Healthcare. Jacobs. Comerica, which left Detroit in 2007. Match Group. HF Sinclair. Atmos Energy. Copart. Trinity Industries. Texas Capital Bancshares. Texas Pacific Land, which owns about 900,000 acres of the Permian and has become one of the strangest large cap stocks in America.

The Dallas Fed counts 125 corporate headquarters relocations to the Dallas area between 2015 and 2024, more than any other Texas metro. Just under half came from California. CBRE has ranked Dallas Fort Worth the top metro in the country for headquarters relocations seven years running, and the firm's own reasoning for why has shifted: labor availability is now the primary driver, ahead of cost. Companies are coming for the workforce, not just the tax bill.

Y'all Street

The phrase is a joke that stopped being one. The Texas Stock Exchange opened for trading on July 6 from a temporary headquarters in Dallas, the first fully integrated national exchange to launch in more than two decades, on $275 million in backing from Citadel Securities, BlackRock, Schwab, and Goldman. Trading rolled out symbol by symbol through July. Exchange traded products list this month and the first corporate listings are expected in October, with IPOs planned for 2027. The New York Stock Exchange responded by opening NYSE Texas and signing a lease in Uptown. Nasdaq opened a Texas office as well.

The exchange is the headline, but the campuses are the substance. Goldman Sachs is building an 815,000 square foot regional headquarters at NorthEnd, an eleven acre district north of downtown, for about 5,000 employees, at a cost of roughly $500 million. Delivery is targeted for early 2028 and it will be the firm's second largest office in the world. Bank of America broke ground on a thirty story tower at Parkside, less than a mile away, due in early 2027. Wells Fargo built a $570 million, 850,000 square foot campus in Las Colinas for about 3,000 workers. And in late August, Morgan Stanley picked Uptown for a hub that commits to 1,500 jobs between 2027 and 2031, with a path to 4,800 by 2035.

One detail in the Fed's July report is worth holding onto. Financial activities employment in Dallas actually dipped slightly in the three months through June, the only sector that declined. That is not a contradiction. The campuses are under construction, not occupied. The jobs the banks have announced show up in 2027 and 2028, and the number to watch is whether the sector's headcount steps up when the buildings open, not whether it grows in the meantime.

Real estate

Residential is quieter than Austin and Houston, in a way that matters.

The Dallas Fort Worth median sale price was $404,900 in July, down 1.7 percent from a year earlier and about 2 percent below the peak of $414,990 in May 2024. The University of Texas at Arlington's real estate center puts the 2025 decline across the region at about 5 percent. Inside the city of Dallas the median is closer to $489,000, and the Park Cities, the two enclaves around SMU that make up Highland Park ISD, run to a median around $2.3 million.

Here is the distinction from the other two big metros. Dallas Fort Worth inventory in July was 37,231 homes, down 4.7 percent from a year earlier, while national inventory rose 4.4 percent. Months of supply fell to 5.0. Homes sat a median 62 days. Existing home sales were up 7.3 percent year over year in April. Prices are soft, but the supply side is tightening rather than loosening, which is the opposite of what Houston and Austin are doing. Houston has 130 percent more sellers than buyers. Dallas does not.

Office is where the county has done its penance and is starting to come out. Colliers put Dallas Fort Worth vacancy at 19.9 percent in the second quarter, below 20 percent for the first time since mid 2023, on 1.4 million square feet of positive absorption. Kidder Mathews, using CoStar's broader definition that includes sublease space, has total vacancy at 25.1 percent, down 90 basis points on the year. Office investment sales through June were up 54 percent from the same period last year.

The number underneath those is Preston Center. The submarket along Northwest Highway between the Park Cities and the Tollway posted direct vacancy of 5.3 percent and the highest asking rents in the region at $62 per square foot. That is a full market inside a metro that is still 20 percent empty, and it tells you where the money in this county actually wants to sit. Uptown is the other one: availability of 23.8 percent against a regional 27.5, Cousins Properties paying $281 million, or $747 per square foot, for The Link, a 94 percent leased tower. That is not distressed pricing. That is a buyer who thinks the Goldman campus is going to pull everything around it up.

The soft spots are real. Northeast Fort Worth office runs above 34 percent vacant. Townhomes in the metro are carrying 6.4 months of supply and their median price fell more than 5 percent in the spring. The regional office availability rate at 27.8 percent is still among the highest in the country. But the county's core, Uptown, Preston Center, the Park Cities, Las Colinas, is the part filling first, and the campuses under construction are all in it.

The sports teams, read as a county

This section is here because it is the cleanest illustration of the theme, not because arenas move capital.

The Mavericks and Stars have shared the American Airlines Center in Victory Park since 2001. Both leases end in July 2031. The two franchises have been in a legal dispute over the building's management agreement, and in the first week of June, one day apart, they announced they are leaving in opposite directions.

The Mavericks signed option agreements on about 104 acres at the former Valley View Mall site, at Interstate 635 and Preston Road, eleven miles north of downtown and still inside the city and the county. The plan is an arena with a mixed use district around it, construction taking about thirty months, opening for the 2031 season. Rick Welts, the executive who built the Warriors' Chase Center, was hired specifically to run this search, and the site more than doubles the minimum acreage he set. Mark Cuban's statement was two words long: in the city. The Adelson and Dumont families, who own the team and the Sands casino business, have been the subject of Las Vegas speculation since they bought it. This announcement is meant to end that.

The Stars are going to Plano, to the Willow Bend mall site, with a nonbinding letter of intent and a city that had already offered a billion dollar arena in February. That puts them in Collin County alongside FC Dallas and the Cowboys' headquarters. The Dallas Wings, meanwhile, moved the other direction, from Arlington into downtown Dallas.

So after 2031 the county keeps one of the five major franchises and gains a women's team. A dead mall on the tollway becomes the anchor of the northern half of the city. And the downtown arena that was built to keep both teams in the core loses both of them. Read as a county, the sports map is the corporate map: the name goes to the suburbs, the core keeps what it can hold, and what it holds gets rebuilt.

The schools

We left this out of the Austin piece and should not have. School districts are the single largest determinant of residential value in a Texas metro, and Dallas County has the strongest concentration in the state.

Start with the public school that outranks every private school in Texas. The School for the Talented and Gifted at Townview Center, a Dallas ISD magnet in Oak Cliff, is ranked eighth in the nation by U.S. News for 2026 and first in Texas, the only Texas school in the national top ten. Three more Dallas ISD magnets, the School of Science and Engineering, the Rangel Young Women's Leadership School, and the Sanders Law Magnet, sit in the national top fifty. Dallas ISD carries a B rating as a district and holds four of the ten best high schools in the state. Nobody outside Dallas knows this, and buyers who do have been quietly using it for years.

Then the Park Cities. Highland Park ISD serves about 7,100 students in two towns wrapped around SMU. Its high school is ranked 42nd in the country. Median home price is around $2.3 million, the district's tax rate is among the lowest in the region at about 83 cents per $100, and nearly every purchase inside the line is a jumbo loan. It is the most expensive residential real estate in Texas outside of Austin's Westlake, and it is the reason Preston Center office trades the way it does.

Coppell ISD, in the northwest corner of the county near the airport, puts two high schools in the national top hundred and is where relocating Las Colinas executives with children tend to land. Richardson ISD, straddling the county line with Lake Highlands on the Dallas side, is the value play: A rated campuses at $400,000 to $900,000. Texas REALTORS data for 2026 shows buyers paying $48 to $72 more per square foot for homes in A rated districts than comparable homes in lower rated ones, and in Dallas County that premium has a floor because the A rated districts are not building.

Above the districts: SMU in University Park, UT Southwestern Medical Center, which is one of the largest employers in the county and one of the top research institutions in the country, and UT Dallas on the Richardson line, which has grown from a commuter school into a serious engineering program in about fifteen years.

The job market

Dallas employment grew at a 3.7 percent annualized rate in June, ahead of the state's 3.5, with unemployment at 4.3 percent against Texas at 4.4. Three month growth was 1.8 percent and gains were broad, with the one exception noted above. Average hourly earnings in the region were $37.45 in April, above both the state and the national figure, and up 2.9 percent on the year.

The Dallas Fed's statewide forecast is the caution. It projected 278,000 new Texas jobs for 2026 in the spring, then said it expected the actual number to land near the low end of its range, around 1.1 percent, citing declining immigration constraining labor supply, productivity gains suppressing demand, and a moderation in its own business surveys. Dallas has outrun the state for most of the year, but the state's ceiling is lower than it was.

Professional and business services is the metro's largest sector and its fastest growing. Finance is the one the whole region is now built to expand. And the relocation pipeline, 125 companies in ten years and roughly 53 new offices opened in the metro in the ninety days before July, is running on labor availability rather than tax arbitrage, which is the healthier of the two reasons.

What would change the picture

Dallas County is the least dramatic of the three big metros and the most institutionally committed. Austin lost its migration story. Houston is buried in listings. Dallas has the highest concentration of finance employment in the country and several billion dollars of bank campuses under construction, and its residential inventory is tightening while everyone else's loosens.

That makes it the hardest of the three to buy well, because the story is already visible and priced in the submarkets where it is happening. Preston Center at 5 percent vacancy is not a discovery. Uptown at $747 a foot is not one either.

Before committing capital we would want:

• Financial activities employment in the Dallas metro stepping up when the Bank of America and Goldman buildings open in 2027 and 2028. The announced jobs are the thesis. The payroll numbers are the proof.
• Office vacancy holding below 20 percent through the delivery of both towers. New supply into a market that just crossed back under the line is the obvious risk.
• Residential inventory continuing to tighten, or at least not reversing. If Dallas Fort Worth listings turn up while Houston's are still building, the county's distinction from the rest of the state is gone.
• A corporate listing on the Texas Stock Exchange in October. Trading was the easy part. A company choosing to list here is what makes the exchange a Dallas institution rather than a Dallas office.

The sharper opportunity is probably not in the core at all. It is in the parts of the county the core is pulling on: the Valley View site and the Tollway corridor north of 635 once the Mavericks commit, the Lake Highlands side of Richardson ISD, the neighborhoods within a Dallas ISD magnet's draw. Those are the places where the county's institutions are the thesis and the price has not caught up to it. We will be looking there.

Sources

• Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Dallas Economic Indicators, July 2026
• Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Texas Employment Forecast, April 2026
• Bureau of Labor Statistics, metro area financial activities employment via The Dallas Morning News
• Colliers, Dallas Fort Worth Office Market Report, second quarter 2026
• Kidder Mathews, Dallas Office Market Report, second quarter 2026, CoStar data
• Savills, Dallas office availability, first quarter 2026
• Homes.com, Dallas Fort Worth Housing Market Report, July 2026
• Texas Real Estate Research Center and University of Texas at Arlington housing analysis, 2026
• Texas REALTORS, school district price premium data, 2026
• U.S. News and World Report, Best High Schools 2026 to 2027
• Texas Stock Exchange, member readiness and launch materials, and Texas Tribune coverage
• WFAA, The Real Deal, and The Dallas Morning News on Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo campuses
• The Dallas Morning News, CBS Texas, and CultureMap on the Mavericks and Stars arena decisions
• CBRE, corporate headquarters relocation rankings

This piece is subject to the site disclosures.

In the middle of July, Lake Travis reached full pool for the first time in seven years. The mark is 681 feet above sea level, and the lake had not touched it since July 2019. For most of the years between, it sat far enough below that boat ramps ended in mud and a limestone hump the locals call Sometimes Island stood well clear of the water. In September 2023 the lake recorded the fourth lowest level in its history. Three years later Sometimes Island is underwater again and the shoreline sits roughly where people who grew up here remember it.

That is a useful way to read the county. Most of what gets written about Austin right now is about what left. The domestic migration, the bidding wars, the office tenants, the 2022 prices. All of that is true. But the part that has stayed is more interesting than the part that went, and it is the part a buyer has to understand.

Who is leaving and who is not

Between July 2022 and July 2023, roughly 2,500 more people moved out of Travis County than moved in. That was the first year of net domestic outflow since 2002. The next year it happened again. The City of Austin's own demographers wrote to the city council in 2025 that domestic migration to the region was at an all time low, and that without international arrivals the county would have lost population outright.

Most of those departures did not go far. Williamson County to the north picked up about 20,000 net movers in the same period, and Hays County to the south grew with it. Bank of America's analysis of card data found the outflow going to Kyle, Buda, New Braunfels, and San Antonio, which is people trading a Travis County address for a cheaper one within commuting distance. The metro as a whole still grew. It was the fourth fastest growing large metro in the country in 2024, down from second, and it now holds about 2.55 million people.

So the county lost its story, not its region. That distinction runs through everything else in this piece.

Real estate

The Austin metro median sale price in July 2026 was $435,000, up 1.0 percent from a year earlier and roughly a fifth below where it peaked in the spring of 2022. Inside the city limits the median was $577,000. Zillow's home value index for the city sits at about $504,000, down 4.4 percent over the past year. Homes are taking about 63 days to sell across the metro and the market carries 4.7 months of inventory, which is balanced by any conventional definition.

Travis County holds 6,586 of the metro's 13,796 active listings, the most of any county in the region, and it added 1,972 new ones in July alone. That is a lot of supply for a county that is not gaining domestic movers.

New construction is where the pressure shows. In the $500,000 to $600,000 tier around Austin, builders are carrying roughly eight months of supply against a normal four to six, and Dripping Springs and Bee Cave in the western part of the county are still absorbing product that was started when the migration numbers looked different. That is the tier where the builder discounts run deepest, and it is the tier that produced the national headline this summer about new homes pricing below resale for the first time on record.

Office is the other half. Austin's office vacancy was 22.4 percent in the first quarter of 2026 according to Colliers, flat from a year earlier and well above the national figure of 18.6 percent. Downtown ran above 22 percent in late 2025, a record, and the Downtown Austin Alliance put it at just over 20 percent in May. When Sixth and Guadalupe opened at 400 West Sixth it was 91 percent empty.

What makes that number worth a second look is what is underneath it. Office using employment in Austin grew about 34 percent between 2019 and 2025, the most of any American city. Net absorption over the trailing year was about 2.6 million square feet against about 180,000 the year before. The vacancy is a construction hangover, not a demand collapse. Four towers came online in eighteen months into a market that had stopped growing at the pace that justified them, and the space is slowly filling behind a job base that never stopped.

Downtown itself is not struggling in the way the vacancy rate implies. The Alliance counts more than 160,000 visitors on an average day, about 14,000 residents, 131,000 employees, and $2.5 billion in consumer spending last year, with foot traffic at 93 percent of where it was before the pandemic. Three large public projects are underway at once: the reconstruction of Interstate 35 through the center of the city, light rail, and the convention center rebuild. New private construction downtown has stopped, and it will stay stopped until those three are far enough along that a developer can see past them.

The listed companies

Travis County has an unusual public company base for a county its size. It is barbelled. At the top sit Tesla and Oracle, and beneath them a bench of mid caps that would anchor most metros on their own.

Tesla's principal executive offices are at 1 Tesla Road, on the Gigafactory site in the eastern part of the county near Del Valle. The company moved its headquarters here in late 2021 and reincorporated in Texas in 2024. It carries a market value around a trillion dollars and unveiled its purpose built robotaxi at ACL Live on Wednesday, in the city where the robotaxi service has been running since the summer of 2025.

Oracle moved its corporate headquarters to Austin at the end of 2020 and owns about 900,000 square feet on the south shore of Lady Bird Lake. It has since signaled an intent to move its world headquarters to Nashville. That intent has never appeared in a securities filing, and the company's most recent annual report still lists Austin as its headquarters facility. CrowdStrike files from an Austin address as well.

Below them, all headquartered inside the county: YETI, with $1.83 billion in revenue in 2024 and a place in the S&P 400. Cirrus Logic, the audio chip designer, headquartered here since 2000 with $1.79 billion in revenue. Natera, the genetic testing company. Bumble, with $965 million in 2025 revenue, a net loss of $895 million, and about 580 employees. Silicon Labs, Q2 Holdings, SailPoint, Vital Farms, and Summit Hotel Properties round out the bench.

Two things are missing from that list and worth naming. Dell is not a Travis County company. It sits in Round Rock, in Williamson County, and so does Samsung's Taylor fab. And the largest employers in Austin's semiconductor and hardware economy, Apple, AMD, NXP, Samsung, Applied Materials, and IBM, all run major campuses here without being headquartered here. The county's payroll depends on companies that answer to boards somewhere else.

Lake Travis

The lake is a reservoir, not a natural body of water, and the Lower Colorado River Authority operates it for flood control and water supply first and recreation a distant third. It and Lake Buchanan upstream are the primary water source for more than a million people. Full pool is 681 feet.

It got full the hard way. The July 2025 rains that put the lake within reach were the same system that flooded the Guadalupe two counties west, and the July 2026 rains that pushed it over the mark were the same system that flooded the Guadalupe again. The combined storage of Travis and Buchanan went from 51 percent to more than 90 percent in the space of a few days last year. As of this week Travis is at 95 percent, coming off the summer.

For the real estate around it, a full lake changes what a property is. Coves that were dry are water again. Docks that ended in air reach the surface. The Oasis and the marinas and the lakefront lots on the north shore have their views back after seven years. The LCRA's own projections say the lake holds close to full under median rainfall through the winter and declines under dry conditions, which is to say the next two years depend on weather, and the last seven years should be the reference for what dry looks like.

The comedy scene

Joe Rogan moved to Austin from Los Angeles in 2020 and opened the Comedy Mothership in March 2023 in the old Ritz Theater on East Sixth Street. It has two rooms, a bar named for Mitzi Shore of the Comedy Store, and a door policy stricter than the airport. Kill Tony, the live podcast that moved from Los Angeles the same year Rogan did, records there every Monday at eight after several years at Vulcan Gas Company down the street. Comics put their names in a bucket for a chance at one minute on stage.

That is the center of it, but it is no longer the whole of it. Shane Gillis is based here. The Creek and the Cave relocated from New York. Cap City, Vulcan, and Sunset Strip on Red River book touring headliners most nights of the week, and Matt Rife and others have filmed specials in rooms on Sixth Street. Rising comics move here now the way they once moved to Los Angeles, on the theory that a slot at the Mothership is the fastest route to an audience. KUT reported in August on counter programming at ColdTowne Theater built explicitly against the Rogan orbit's reputation, which is what a scene looks like when it is large enough to have factions.

What matters about this for a county reader is not the comedy. It is that Austin built a national cultural draw from nothing in five years, in an old theater on a street the city had written off, and the draw is unrelated to the tech economy that the migration numbers track. When the tech story cooled, Sixth Street did not.

What would change the picture

Austin is the opposite problem from Fredericksburg. There, the demand was priced in and the entry points were closed. Here, the price has reset and the entry points are open. That does not make it a buy. It makes it a place where the question is about the floor rather than the ceiling.

Before committing capital we would want:

• Domestic migration into Travis County turning positive again, or at minimum the outflow to Williamson and Hays slowing. That is the number that moved first on the way down and it is the one to watch on the way back.
• Office vacancy below 20 percent citywide with absorption holding near the trailing year's pace. The job growth is real. The space has to catch up to it.
• The $500,000 to $600,000 new construction tier back under six months of supply, which would mean the builders have worked through what they started in 2022.
• On the lake, a dry winter that does not take Travis below 90 percent. If it holds, the lakefront has a different risk profile than it did in 2023.

The county is not in decline. It is in the part of the cycle where the froth has left and the base is visible, and the base is a trillion dollar company, a quarter million office workers, a full lake, and a street that reinvented itself. We will keep reading this one, and unlike Fredericksburg, we would not be surprised to find something here.

Sources

• Unlock MLS, Austin metro housing data via KXAN
• Zillow Home Value Index, Austin
• Colliers, Austin office market, first quarter 2026
• CoStar, Austin office market report, first quarter 2026
• Avison Young, office using employment growth, 2019 to 2025
• Downtown Austin Alliance, 2026 State of Downtown Report
• Lower Colorado River Authority, Highland Lakes operations
• Water Data for Texas, Lake Travis reservoir data
• United States Census Bureau, population estimates and American Community Survey
• City of Austin Planning Department, demographics memoranda
• Company annual filings and Wikipedia for headquarters and revenue figures
• KUT, Austin comedy reporting, August 2026
• Realtor.com, new construction price cuts by metro

This piece is subject to the site disclosures.

The 138th Gillespie County Fair closed yesterday. It has run since 1881 and is the oldest continuous county fair in Texas, pausing only for two world wars. The last two days are pari-mutuel quarter horse and thoroughbred racing on a track that fills a 3,200 seat grandstand, at a time when other Texas tracks have closed. Before the racing comes a parade of more than two hundred units down Main Street, a livestock show, FFA and 4-H judging, pie and quilt judging, and music every evening.

A county of twenty-eight thousand people puts on something most places ten times the size could not sustain. Working out why is most of the job here.

What is actually there

Fredericksburg was settled by Germans in 1846 and named for a Prussian prince. It has never stopped being about that. Main Street is limestone and Sunday houses. The food is schnitzel and sausage and strudel, made without irony by families who have done it for generations. The architecture is protected and the town knows exactly what it has.

Within thirty miles sits the rest of the story.

The wine corridor. More than 100 wineries operate in the Texas Hill Country and Fredericksburg has become its center. Wine Road 290 runs east out of town with tasting rooms strung alongside it. Becker Vineyards was planted in the early nineties, when the region had only a handful of producers, and it is the origin story most people in the industry point back to. The Hill Country is now among the most visited winemaking regions in the country.

The dance halls. Luckenbach is ten miles southeast. A dance hall, a post office, and a general store under a live oak, with a functional population of zero. It exists because Waylon and Willie sang about it in 1977 and because people keep showing up to sit in folding chairs and listen to whoever is picking that afternoon. Around it, the Hill Country supports a density of dance halls and small venues with no real equivalent anywhere else in the country. Some of these buildings have hosted bands continuously for over a century.

The fair and the race meet. Worth restating as an economic fact rather than a charming one. An eight day summer race meet plus a four day fair draws from El Paso to Beaumont, run by a nonprofit whose volunteer board donates fifteen thousand hours a year. That is civic capacity, and a developer could not force that anywhere else.

The camps. The Hill Country summer camp tradition goes back more than a century and is woven into how generations of Texas families understand this region. The camps and the communities around them are still recovering from the floods of the past two summers, but the rallying support of the surrounding communities has kept them strong and in good spirits. Camp La Junta in Hunt has been running since 1928 and is truly a beautiful place.

Enchanted Rock, the peach orchards, and the Nimitz museum. A pink granite dome, a fruit crop the region is genuinely known for, and the National Museum of the Pacific War, which is a serious institution sitting improbably in a town of twelve thousand.

Comfort and Kerrville. Comfort is smaller and quieter, with an intact nineteenth century commercial district that priced out Fredericksburg buyers have been finding for a decade. Kerrville is the larger working town, with a hospital, a school district, and a year round economy.

The ranches. Rolling limestone, live oak cover, spring fed creeks, long views. Some working, most not. The Hill Country ranch has been a status asset for Texas money for a century and still is. Two metropolitan areas close by, Fredericksburg for local town life, and the rolling hill country around all of it gives these an appeal like nothing else in the state.

Retirement. Gillespie County’s median age is 48.5 against a Texas median in the mid thirties. That is not a distortion. People retire here deliberately, and they arrive carrying equity from somewhere more expensive. The area draws Texans who are ready to slow down without giving anything up.

The tour buses. These are what make the wine corridor work commercially. Operators run day trips out of Austin and San Antonio, both roughly ninety minutes away, moving groups from tasting room to tasting room. It solves the obvious problem with a wine region, and it lets the corridor draw on two metros of more than four million people without either one treating Fredericksburg as a suburb.

The country itself is beautiful in a way that does not photograph well and has to be driven. Clear green water over limestone, cypress on the banks, hills that go blue at distance. That is a real part of why people come and why they stay.

The demand is real. The pricing already knows.

Tourism generated roughly $175 million in visitor spending in Gillespie County in 2024, supported about 1,200 jobs, and produced around $17 million in tax revenue. For a county this size that is an enormous figure, and it is not speculative. It shows up in sales tax and hotel occupancy tax receipts every quarter.

None of this is a secret, and entry prices reflect it.

Raw land in Gillespie County averaged about $54,400 per acre in the first quarter of 2026, against roughly $53,300 a year earlier. That average is skewed high by small tract sales and is not what a large ranch trades at. The level is still striking. The broader Austin, Waco and Hill Country region averaged a record $7,704 per acre in 2025, and the Texas statewide average is closer to $5,200. Gillespie trades at a multiple of its own region.

Volume is the more useful number. Through the first half of 2026, 223 individual properties changed hands in the county against 222 in the same period of 2025. One additional transaction, on roughly 15% more total dollar volume. There are not more buyers. The buyers who are there are simply paying more to be there.

The hurdle

The lodging market has turned. Fredericksburg had 3,338 active short term rental listings as of June 2026. Annual occupancy runs somewhere in the 33% to 40% range, average daily rates around $334 to $341, and average annual revenue per listing near $36,200. Revenue was down 15.2% year over year as of June, while supply kept growing.

That is an oversupplied market. Everyone who noticed the demand story bought a cabin, and the cabins now compete with each other. The gap between top listings above 64% occupancy and bottom quartile properties near 19% says the remaining profit goes to people who are good at operating, not to people who are good at buying.

Regulation has closed the easy version. The City of Fredericksburg’s short term rental framework was first adopted in 2022 and fully phased in as of January 2026. It includes a density cap. Not every property inside city limits can obtain a permit, and availability has to be confirmed before an offer rather than after. Properties in the ETJ outside city limits fall outside the city permit requirement but still owe hotel occupancy tax.

The cap is the interesting part. The city has effectively frozen the supply of legal in town short term rentals. That makes a permitted property worth materially more than an identical unpermitted one, and it closes the obvious thesis to new entrants at any scale. Buy a cottage near Main Street and rent it out. The answer is frequently just no.

So the two entry points that brought most outside capital into this county over the past decade are now both closed. One by oversupply, one by ordinance.

What is not being underwritten, and why

River adjacent property in this region is outside our scope for now.

Much of the Hill Country’s flood mapping is badly out of date. Kerr County’s official FEMA map was last revised in 2011, and after the past two summers that mapping is going to be revisited. Flood maps determine where building is permitted and whether flood insurance is required, which means they determine what a riverfront parcel is worth. We do not know what those maps will say.

That is not a judgment about river property as an asset. It is a statement that we cannot size the risk today, and we do not take risks we cannot size. We would revisit after the remapping is published and after at least one insurance renewal cycle has priced against it.

What would change the picture

We are not writing off this submarket. The demand fundamentals are among the most durable in Texas. A cultural asset that genuinely cannot be replicated, two large metros inside ninety minutes, a retiree inflow that is not economically sensitive, and a visitor base that predates the wine corridor and will outlast any single trend within it.

Before committing capital we would want:

• Evidence that lodging supply has stopped growing. Rising revenue against flat listing counts, not rising listings.
• Assets whose economics do not depend on nightly rate. Commercial on or near Main Street, land held on ag exemption, anything where the return does not require winning an occupancy fight against three thousand competitors.
• A seller who needs to sell. In a market where transaction count is flat and dollar volume is up, patient sellers are not the ones transacting.

The Albert Hotel has opened downtown. A Waldorf Astoria has been announced for the area. A 117 acre mixed use development called The Sycamore is slated for the wine trail. Institutional capital has already decided this corridor is worth underwriting. That confirms the demand read and tells you we are not early.

Being right about a place and being early to it are different things, and only one of them pays. We will keep reading this market. We will not be buying into it this year.

Sources

• Texas Real Estate Research Center, Texas A&M University — rural land price and transaction data
• Travel Texas, Economic Impact of Travel — Gillespie County visitor spending
• City of Fredericksburg — short-term rental ordinance
• Gillespie County Fair and Festivals Association
• Texas Public Radio and Texas Tribune reporting on Kerr County flood mapping
• Short-term rental market data aggregators for Fredericksburg listing counts, occupancy, and revenue

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