When folks are shopping for a new home in the Houston area, there’s a good chance they’ll wind up in a newer home.
In a new report by Homes.com, Houston ranks No. 8 in the U.S. for the newest homes for sale, with 29.3 percent of listings being built in 2000 or later.
Ranking above Houston, here are the top locations for the newest homes being sold:
- New Orleans, 40.8 percent
- Raleigh, North Carolina, 38.4 percent
- Nashville, Tennessee, 35.4 percent
- Austin, 34.6 percent
- Atlanta, 34.4 percent
- (tie), Miami and Charlotte, North Carolina, 33.9 percent each
Elsewhere in Texas, Dallas appears at No. 17 (23.5 percent).
It’s no wonder that Houston ranks stands so tall on the newer-home ladder. According to the National Association of Home Builders, more permits (48,208) were issued last year for new-home construction in the Houston area than anywhere else in the U.S. Dallas-Fort Worth ranked second (43,884), and Austin held the No. 5 spot (21,653).
Whether new or old, the inventory of homes for sale in the Houston area is shallow.
Despite a 26.8 percent year-over-year increase in new listings in April, buyer demand pushed the inventory of single-family homes to a 1.4-month supply versus a 3.4-month supply a year earlier, according to the Houston Association of Realtors (HAR).
“In my 20 years in real estate, I have never seen such dramatic forces sweeping across the Houston housing market as we have experienced since the coronavirus pandemic began,” HAR Chairman Richard Miranda of Keller Williams Platinum says in a news release. “The market is humming along at a record pace, fueled by low mortgage rates despite dwindling inventory and rising prices. However, without a healthy boost in new listings in the weeks and months ahead, the current pace of sales cannot be sustained.”
The Texas Real Estate Research Center at Texas A&M University says single-family home sales shot up 24.6 percent in the Houston area for the first four months of this year versus the first four months of last year. That compares with 9.3 percent in Austin, 4.8 percent in Dallas-Fort Worth, and 15.4 percent in San Antonio.
