Coronavirus impact

Houston home listings take a dip thanks to COVID-19

New home listings in Houston are actually up — despite coronavirus.

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We're coming up on the best time to list your Houston house, but thanks to COVID-19, the real estate landscape looks pretty different this year. Zillow reports that 3-D home tours are up 408 percent from February, and newly listed homes nationwide were down 27.1 percent from a year ago in the first week of April.

But it's not quite as bad in Houston. While the rest of the U.S. is seeing a 19 percent drop in new listings since March 1, 2020, Houston is actually up 1.9 percent.

Active listings here are also up 3.9 percent since the same period. Total U.S. inventory, meanwhile, has only grown by 2.5 percent since March 1, which likely correlates to homes sitting on the market for longer.

"It is clear that many would-be home sellers are adopting a wait-and-see approach as uncertainty continues to rule," says Skylar Olsen, senior principal economist at Zillow. "Our understanding of U.S. economic conditions is changing weekly, if not daily, and early unemployment figures are striking, so it's understandable that some are hesitant to put their home on the market.

"It is possible that this year's busy home shopping season is pushed into winter as some opt to hang back, but activity continues from those who need to buy or sell for a job move or another major life event. What's not likely is that the bulk of potential home sellers and buyers simply throw up their hands and pull back from the market entirely."

By March 1, 2020, new listings in Houston were up 6.8 percent from the same time a year ago. Fast-forward just a month, and that number was down 8.7 percent. The outlook in Houston is definitely brighter than what's happening nationwide: nationwide listings were up 17.3 percent on March 1 and down a significant 27.1 percent by April 5.

Elsewhere in Texas, Dallas-Fort Worth has seen a 18 percent decrease in new listings from March to April of this year, and listings are also down 17.2 percent from April 2019.

San Antonio is an outlier, remaining neutral at zero percent change in new listings from March 1-April 5, 2020, and only down 11.8 percent from April 2019.

But Austin is truly bucking the trend, with new listings up 12.8 percent in the past month, for a year-over-year increase of 13.5 percent.

The greatest slowdowns in new listings since March 1 were seen in Detroit (down 61.8 percent), Pittsburgh (down 55.5 percent), and New York (down 49.1 percent). But new listings were actually up or flat in 12 of the 35 largest U.S. metros, led by Phoenix (up 18.3 percent), Atlanta (up 15.6 percent), Sacramento (up 13.7 percent), and Minneapolis-St. Paul (up 13.7 percent).

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red-hot housing

Houston boasts No. 20 hottest real estate market among big U.S. cities

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It doesn't get much hotter than the Houston housing market. A new report has ranked H-Town as the 20th best real estate market among America's biggest cities right now.

WalletHub's annual study, "Best Real Estate Markets (2026)," compares the real estate markets in 300 U.S. cities based on 17 relevant metrics, such as "housing market attractiveness," home value forecasts, housing affordability, population growth, and many others. Cities were also ranked by size: large cities with over 300,000 residents; midsize cities with 150,000-300,000 residents; and small cities with fewer than 150,000 residents.

In the overall ranking of the best housing markets in America, regardless of city size, Houston ranks 90th out of all 300 cities.

WalletHub ranks Houston's real estate market No. 102 nationally, and its "affordability and economic environment" ranks 111th overall.

This is how WalletHub ranks the "health" of Houston's housing market (where No. 1 is the best and No. 150 is average):

No. 51 – Job Growth Rate
No. 96 – Home Price as a Percentage of Income
No. 99 – Median Home-Price Appreciation
No. 128 – Foreclosure Rate
No. 159 – Share of Seriously Underwater Mortgages
No. 172 – Percentage of Delinquent Mortgage Holders
No. 173 – Median Days on the Market
No. 192 – Maintenance Costs as a Percentage of Income

Despite Houston's good standing among the biggest cities in America, a separate WalletHub report claims Houston is one of the worst cities for first-time homebuyers. Instead, Houstonians are turning to popular ZIP codes in suburbs like Cypress and Katy, which rank among the hottest places to move to in the U.S.

Other high-performing housing markets in Texas
Two popular North Texas suburbs — Frisco and McKinney — topped WalletHub's overall list of the best real estate markets in the U.S. for 2026 at Nos. 1 and 2, respectively, and they locked in the top two spots in the midsize city ranking, too.

Frisco tops the nationwide "affordability and economic environment" category, and ranks No. 2 nationally for its real estate market.

"When you look at home prices as a percentage of income, [Frisco] is the 95th-cheapest among the 300 cities in our study," the report said. "But it’s the 11th-cheapest city for phone service and the 11th-cheapest for maintenance and energy."

Frisco boasts the highest share of houses that were built between 2010 and 2024, at nearly 47 percent, which WalletHub says is "good news for people who want all the benefits of a recently-constructed home," without having to "put in a lot of work" to renovate an older or run down home.

"If you aim to make a profit in the long run with your housing purchase, you’ll need to look beyond tangible factors like square footage and style," the report's author wrote. "Those factors certainly drive up property values. From an investor’s standpoint, though, they hold less significance than historical market trends and the economic health of residents."

Nearby Denton and Allen also made the overall top 10, respectively ranking as the 5th and 8th best real estate markets in the U.S. for 2026. Denton similarly ranked 5th in the midsize city rankings, and Allen topped the list of small cities.

The top 10 best real estate markets in America for 2026 are:

No. 1 – Frisco, Texas
No. 2 – McKinney, Texas
No. 3 – Murfreesboro, Tennessee
No. 4 – Durham, North Carolina
No. 5 – Denton, Texas
No. 6 – Cary, North Carolina
No. 7 – Madison, Wisconsin
No. 8 – Allen, Texas
No. 9 – Charlotte, North Carolina
No. 10 – Irvine, California

wallethub housing market real estate reports houston