How Dallas-Fort Worth Suburban Construction Stacks Up Nationally

Here’s a fun fact that everyone in the Dallas/Fort Worth area already knew: Housing construction in the suburbs far exceeds home and apartment building in the urban core over the past decade. Duh.

But how does the D/FW area stack up nationally?

In a recent study, Apartment List found that D/FW’s new housing ranks No. 9 among the nation’s top 100 largest metros, maybe a little lower than we expected.

The study also found that all the counties surrounding Dallas County had a 20.9 percent growth from 2010-2020. Rockwall County saw the fastest growth in new housing, with an increase of 39 percent. Check the numbers here.

On a state level, dense pockets of growth can also be seen around the Houston metros, and along the corridor between Austin and San Antonio from 2010-2020. The fastest-growing Texas county was Hays (48-plus percent), just south of Austin.

For the study, Apartment List analyzed housing market dynamics nationwide, including urban-suburban growth patterns, the ratio of new jobs to housing units constructed, housing affordability, and more.

States with the highest growth rates were North Dakota (20-plus percent), Utah (19-plus percent), and Texas (15-plus percent).

According to Apartment List data, D/FW added approximately 438,000 new housing units, increasing the housing stock by 18 percent. Dallas also added 802,000 new jobs in the same span, an increase of 29 percent.

Added together, a new housing unit should be available for every 1-2 new jobs, according to Apartment List. In D/FW, 1.8 jobs have been added for every new housing unit, an indication that the market is building enough new housing to keep pace with demand.

That, of course, is not the case in the current market.

Housing stock is so low that one Dallas real estate talk show host joked that we now have more real estate agents than available homes are on the market. Hmmm, let’s see, MetroTex Association of Realtors listed 10,247 active listings in May, and in 2019, Homelight.com counted 16,780 agents in Dallas. Yep, he wasn’t joking.