Because home builders don't make money by buying and selling houses, they make money by building them and selling them.
I'm not sure what you're trying to imply here. You should spell it out explicitly.
It's entirely different if you're buying the housing already built; there's no productive activity, you're just a rentier and do not benefit at all from falling housing prices.
The differences in interests between an asset holder and a productive builder are night and day.
Right... my point is that the costs are not far below the eventual sales price. That's why construction is slowing down.
And as mentioned several other times, it's actually not as simple as cost > sale price. It's margin > margin of alternative investments of similar scale and risk profile.
Every single municipality in the US I'm familiar with has done everything they can to make it expensive to build and try to remove any profit margin from building. Which leads to capital moving towards piggybacking on the rentierism of the average homeowner, the people who control the policies that make it unaffordable to build.
IIRC, Mountain House (near Tracy, CA) in the 2008-2010 crash was an example of a large new development that did not initially sell and was in serious danger of going zombie, and not having the new schools that had been promised to people moving in.
Yes, a ton.
https://www.drhorton.com/texas/austin
> That could explain high profit while dissuading new construction in Austin.
Given they're still building a ton in Austin, there doesn't seem to be a dissuasion for building there. I do not have any idea about their average margin in the Austin market versus other markets though, but if that was a major decider on whether to build or not the answer is they're still choosing to build.
Looking at this data:
https://constructioncoverage.com/research/cities-investing-m...
If housing starts in Austin drop 15% for 2026, as some places are estimating, that puts Austin from 32,294 to 27,453 new homes added. It changes its national rank in this dataset from #6 to...#6.
Your claim is that falling prices aren’t leading to less development.
That is both logically and empirically false.
The observation is simply that supply chases demand. As demand is satisfied, prices go down and supply creation slows down or even stops. It’s befuddling that you’re acting like this doesn’t apply here.
Trying to compare competitiveness of various markets on where builders are going to invest their money building?
> It's margin > margin of alternative investments of similar scale and risk profile.
Homebuilders want to build homes. They'll build where its profitable for them to build. Lots of markets are facing downturns in new construction, but home builders are still choosing markets like Austin more than tons of other markets.
> Your claim is that falling prices aren’t leading to less development.
I never said such a thing, although I do think you're potentially thinking in too black and white on it. In fact, I think it was quite clear I was talking about comparing the Austin homebuilding market to other markets with my statement "Austin market versus other markets though".
> As demand is satisfied, prices go down and supply creation slows down or even stops
I think we're still far from demand actually being satiated in the Austin area. Its still the 6th most growing metro in the US, even with housing construction dropping an estimated 15% for 2026.
If builders were really heavily dissuaded from building in Austin, if margins were really that terrible compared to the rest of the country, why would it be the 6th largest spot of housing growth in the US? Shouldn't all those builders decide to invest elsewhere?
I agree, margins are probably less than they were or were projected to be compared to just a few years ago. And I agree that's probably one of the biggest drivers of new construction cooling a bit. But the questions I was answering were:
Is Dr Horton building homes in Austin?
Are the margins in Austin pulling down their average margin?
The answer to the first is obvious and easy. The answer to the second is more complicated, but if it was truly dragging down their average margin in any significant way wouldn't they have just stopped and invested in building in the higher margin areas?
US homebuilder gross margins have been declining since 2023.
Or land ends up better value left as suburban house than developing up.
Or they build where sale cost - build cost is maximized. I.e. different city.
Governments need to build more housing. Make it bland so snobs can price discrimnate themselves to buy builders' homes. Why thrifts by the government home for value for money (and quality).
They're just gonna pay builders a sum anyway so it's not like they need to shoulder the full upfront cost anyway.
But surely soviet style huge blocks of tiny t0 apartments all stuck together is a dream...
Public transit. Capturing enough money from fares is difficult, maybe impossible, but it's quite profitable if you can capture the value generated by the enabled economic activity and raised property values.
The same really goes for most infrastructure. There's a reason the government operates nearly all the roads. Also the fire departments and police stations
In this case what people want is the reverse. They want the government to build in Austin.
The government should be involved when market forces won't solve an issue, ie no market will make it profitable to send an ambulance to a town 3h away in the mountains. You don't need affordable housing in the center of Austin just because it's trendy though.
Government doesn't need to make a profit due to taxation.
UK public housing is widely known for being shit. Unsafe, puts all the poor people together in a block. There's bunch of crime, and your kids will be likely to stay stuck there or go to jail due to bad influences.
Social housing should be sprinkled around it has been found. So nice example of what I was saying.
And privately built appartment blocks are awful. One cracked in Sydney had to be evacuated. Concrete cancer and water ingress issues. It is concrete enshittification.