Texas leads nation in new homes for sale

Six of the state’s cities top the list, report says

(iStock/Illustration by Kevin Rebong for The Real Deal)

Texas is the “poster child for fresh homes for sale,” leading the country in percentage of new homes on the market, according to a new study. When it comes to homes completed since 2012 that are on the market, six Texas cities made the top 20, Point2 reported. The publication is a division of property software company Yardi Systems.

The report studied available listings in the 50 most populous cities in the United States. It defines old homes as those built in or before 1970. “New homes” in this case mean houses that were built in or after 2012. (Presumably, the houses in between are middle-aged.) While old houses made up 50 percent or more of the listings in almost all the cities studied — El Paso being the only exception — new homes for sale were most abundant in the South and West, with a couple of Midwestern outliers.

Along with Oklahoma City, Texas cities El Paso, San Antonio and Austin are the only large cities where houses built after 2012 make up more than 40 percent of those for sale. Houston and San Antonio were just behind first-ranked New York City in the highest total number of homes for sale that were built in the past decade. New York had about 4,500 and the Texas cities had about 3,500 each.

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The report attributes the proliferation of new homes in the state to a number of economic and other types of booms — including population growth, employment rate (especially in construction-related fields) and active development.

In addition to Oklahoma City, six other Southern cities join the Texas metros in having the highest share of new homes on the market: Nashville, Tennessee; Jacksonville, Florida; Charlotte, North Carolina; Atlanta, Georgia; Raleigh, North Carolina; and Tampa, Florida.

Detroit, Michigan, and Baltimore, Maryland, topped the list of cities with the highest percentage of old homes on the market. ​​In the country as a whole, the US Census reports that almost 40 percent of listed homes were built before 1970.

[Point2] — Cindy Widner

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