An Energetic Recovery

Nearly five years ago, Exxon Mobil announced plans to erect a new corporate campus just north of Houston. Though construction and Exxon’s full transition into the new space isn’t scheduled for completion until later this year, a substantial enough portion of building had finished by mid-2014 to help usher in a surge of energy investment and growth into the area. It was the catalyst for the dramatic jumps in home sales and price that turned Houston into a truly premiere market, not only attractive to domestic buyers and investors, but international, as well.

“With Exxon, the effect came both from the industry itself being powerful and employees relocating to the area,” Sartin explains. “Many people wanted their house on the market because they knew they could get a higher price.”

With sellers scrambling to marry timing and demand for an attractive return, the market blew up, and the steady influx of new residents made sure the pace was seemingly sustainable. However, as production disagreements between OPEC countries translated into plummeting crude values, the economic potency of energy waned and Houston’s boom slowed to a modest swell. From May 2014 to May 2015, total sales in terms of dollar volume have dropped 0.4 percent from $2.282 billion to $2.273 billion, according to the Houston Association of Realtors.

“The market is correcting itself to be more of an average market,” Sardin admits, which, she adds, is greatly altering her pricing strategies from optimistic to baseline. “We’re pricing within the recommendation. It’s all about making sure the property doesn’t exceed what the bank has lent the buyer. Thinking like an appraiser is imperative to pricing the properties.”

Trujillo, who leads The TruTeam, remarks that the deceleration of Houston’s market, apart from the significant energy hiccup, has also proven the product of low building production for entry-level homes, a problem shared by several major metro markets. According to Redfin, homes for sale priced $198,000 and below fell by 17 percentage points year-over-year nationwide in June, while middle-market inventories rose 3 percent and top-level inventories jumped 14 percent

“Builders had a slowdown following the recession and still hadn’t caught up in 2014,” Trujillo says.

She explained that while she now consistently prices homes using a formula that includes neighborhood-specific sales data from the past three to six months, there are still neighborhoods in which demand affords sellers an opportunity to price homes “a bit higher.”