Racing to Build Texas’ ‘Boomtowns’: New Construction Keeps Pace with Surging Migration 

In a race to build what most people might call boomtowns amid an unprecedented population surge, Texas has, figuratively speaking, built an equivalent of New Mexico—and more. To be exact, since the pandemic, Texas has built more homes than the entire single-family housing stock of its neighboring state. New construction sprung up at an unprecedented pace in metro centers like Sherman-Denison, Lubbock, College Station-Bryan.  

The great pandemic migration has seen millions of Americans relocating to the Lone Star State. Between 2000 and 2024, Texas gained a staggering 2.14 million residents. To put it into context, the massive population influx is an equivalent of the entire population of iNew Mexico, which has 2.13 million residents.¹  Of the 2.14 million population gain, 1.57 million, or 73.4 percent, are from Texas-bound net migration (domestic and international). 

Many new Texans came as a myriad of major tech and energy companies relocated or expanded to prominent urban centers like Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth, and Houston. Others came under newfound flexibility afforded by working from home, attracted to the sunbelt state’s economic opportunities, relatively low cost of living, affordable housing, and low taxes.  

A demographic surge of this scale has had a profound impact on the Texas housing market. Nowhere is that more evident than in Austin, DFW, and Houston, where home prices have rapidly ascended due to the population increase of those cities. New supply of housing cannot spring up overnight to meet the soaring demand. New residential development can often take one to three years to complete. There’s planning, land acquisition, and development to new construction. So, in the short term, home prices will have to absorb the sudden demand shock.  

New construction responded swiftly—albeit not overnight—to the surge in migration. Counties and municipalities across the state issued more single-family housing building permits than ever before. Between 2020 and 2024, 781,020 permits were authorized for new construction, up 40.9 percent from the previous five-year period (2015-19). The number of new constructions that broke ground stood at a total of 744,430.²  On a national scale, Texas accounted for 16.5 percent of all new-home construction permits from 2020 to 2024.  

At the local level, the relationship between new construction and net migration is unsurprisingly strong (see figure). The horizontal axis measures a city’s five-year net migration, normalized as a percentage of its 2019 population base. The vertical axis represents average yearly new construction from 2020 to 2024, normalized using new construction in the 2019 base year. 

A Near One-for-One Statistical Relation Between New Construction and Net Migration, 2020-24 

Note: The fitted regression line has a coefficient of 0.96.  
Source: Texas Real Estate Research Center; U.S. Census Bureau 

Statistically, there is an almost one-for-one relationship between net migration and new construction, as indicated by a fitted regression line. Here are some additional market highlights (see table): 

• Located north of DFW and with a population of more than 150,000, Sherman-Denison MSA saw the highest net migration (11.3 percent) and the fastest pace of new construction. New construction during 2020-24 climbed to 1,300 per year, compared to 819 in 2019, an equivalent of 58.9 percent increase per year for the past  five years.  

• With a population of approximately 367,000, Lubbock experienced the second-highest growth in new construction, averaging 44 percent per year in the past five years. Lubbock MSA had a net migration of 3.4 percent. 

• Austin had the second- highest net migration (8.9 percent), and the surge in migration outpaced the rate of new construction (7.2 percent). The city’s new construction was among the slowest, making it an outlier.  

• Expectedly, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio saw a high net migration, at 6.8 percent, 6.5 percent and 6.3 percent, respectively. But the pace of new construction, at 22 percent, 20.8 percent and 18.2 percent, respectively, was relatively slower than many smaller metros in the state.  

• Waco, El Paso, and Laredo had relatively little, or no net migration, and new construction growth was flat or negative.  

• Midland stood out as an outlier. It had its share of net migration (3.6 percent), but new construction was nearly 30 percent below the 2019 level. A city that is heavily reliant on the energy economy, weak oil and gas prices have kept new construction activity low. Just prior to the pandemic in 2018 and 2019, Midland experienced a boom in oil production and population growth and consequently a construction boom. 

Metro New Construction, 2020-24 

Source: Texas Real Estate Research Center 

1. The nine states that has a population smaller than the Texas’ population gain include Nebraska (2.01M), Idaho (2.00M), Maine (1.41M), Montana (1.14M), Wyoming (0.59M), West Virginia (1.77M), South Dakota (0.92M), North Dakota (0.80M), District of Columbia (0.70M). Source; U.S. Census Bureau 2024 Population Estimates.  ↩︎
2. Building permits data is from U.S. Census Bureau; New housing starts data is from Dodge Construction Network.   ↩︎