Texas BTR Development Slow Amid Pending Legislation

Texas led the nation in built-to-rent development last year. Now, between a landscape verging on oversupply and the dangling threat of a ban on institutional homeownership, firms are feeling skittish.

“There’s virtually no new product that’s getting done right now that I’m aware of,” said Mark Wolf, founder of BTR developer AHV Communities. “Most of my investor partners are sitting on the sidelines, waiting for this to go some kind of direction, for better or for worse, just so they know what we’re dealing with.”

HR 6644, dubbed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, would require developers to sell BTR homes to individual buyers within seven years of building them. The pending legislation looms large over Texas, which accounted for a plurality of the top 10 metros for BTR construction last year. Dallas, Fort Worth, Austin and Houston together had more than 14,000 BTR units underway last summer, making Texas the biggest BTR state market in America and putting Dallas in second place nationally behind Phoenix for the biggest metro market, according to RealPage.

Due to the ROAD to Housing Act, many Texas firms see further investment in BTR communities as a gamble, a Dallas Fed survey published last month.

“The bill kind of screws the whole industry,” Wolf said, whose company manages several single-family communities in San Antonio and some Texas suburbs.

The bill has stifled development and trades abruptly, according to Dallas-based Bridge Tower, recognized by Northmarq as the most prolific local BTR developer in North Texas.

“We’ve had to reevaluate a number of deals in our pipeline,” founder Jackson Hu said. “We had a deal that was two weeks from closing when that provision effectively ended it, not because of anything fundamental to the asset or the buyer, but purely because of the statutory overhang.”

BTR development was already coming off a years-long spree in Texas prior to the bill’s Senate vote. In the North Dallas area, the most active BTR submarket in the state, the first quarter of 2026 saw just 1,170 units under construction, a 76 percent year-over-year decline, according to Yardi Matrix. National annual trends are similar: Developers started about 60,000 units in 2025, down from a peak of about 80,000 in 2024, according to Northmarq.

“The whole industry is a little bit overbuilt right now,” Wolf said. “So the markets are soft because of overbuilding, but also people are unsure of the future.”

However, in North Texas, demand continues to outpace supply, according to Hu. While vacancy rose slightly in other major BTR metros last year, including Phoenix and Houston, vacancy tightened by 70 basis points to 6.3 percent in Dallas-Fort Worth, Northmarq found.

“The fundamentals for BTR in Texas remain strong. Demographic demand is strong, the land pipeline in DFW is active, and capital wants to be deployed into this sector,” Hu said. “The constraint isn’t market-driven; it’s policy driven. If the seven-year divestiture provision is removed, I’d expect activity to resume fairly quickly.”