Dallas-Fort Worth Housing Starts Slid in 2025

Homebuilders across North Texas spent much of 2025 pulling back on new construction as demand softened and inventory piled up in what’s increasingly a buyer’s market.

That’s according to new data issued in a report from Residential Strategies, a residential market research company. The Dallas Business Journal reported that builders in the Dallas-Fort Worth area started construction on 8,386 homes in the fourth quarter, down 17.7 percent from 10,190 in the same period of the prior year. For the full year, starts totaled 41,222 for-sale homes, a 12.3 percent drop from 46,991 in 2024, according to RSI data.

“It is very clear that builder profits will be much lower in 2026 compared to 2025, as DFW remains a buyer’s market,” Ted Wilson, a principal at Residential Strategies, wrote in the analysis.

The resale market hasn’t offered much relief. Existing home sales in North Texas inched up 1.4 percent over the 12 months ending November, even as listings jumped more than 12 percent to 32,300, according to the Texas A&M Real Estate Center.

The slowdown reflects a broader cooling in the region’s economic tailwinds. Job growth in DFW weakened sharply last year, with the metro adding just 18,000 net new jobs in 2025, according to the Texas Workforce Commission. That’s a far cry from the roughly 95,000 jobs that were added each year in the metroplex between 2010 and 2023.

Builders are also staring at a glut of land. North Texas ended 2025 with about 110,000 vacant developed lots and another 68,000 lots in the development pipeline, Residential Strategies said.

The firm noted early signs of increased traffic heading into 2026, which may not translate cleanly into profits, and fourth quarter prospective buyer traffic leveled off at the end of 2025.

“Builders have been able to sell to a backlog of pent-up demand in DFW, but affordability challenges have required price discounting, rate buy-downs, and other incentives,” Wilson said in the report, cutting into margins.

At year-end, DFW had 12,317 finished vacant homes, slightly up from the prior quarter, reinforcing builders’ decisions to slow starts while trimming prices on standing inventory. Closings followed the same trajectory. Builders closed on 10,473 homes in the fourth quarter, down 5.5 percent, year-over-year. For all of 2025, closings fell to about 45,000, compared with nearly 48,000 in 2024, according to the data.— Eric Weilbacher