There are more homes for sale in Houston right now than at any point HAR has ever recorded. 40,750 of them.
That is not a crash, and I want to say so plainly before anybody forwards this to their nervous brother-in-law. Prices didn't fall. Sales went up. What changed is that buyers finally have choices again — and choices are leverage.
By the numbers
Single-family sales: 8,340 homes, up 1.6% from July 2025
Median price: $340,000, up 0.6%
Average price: $440,816, up 1.9%
Active listings: 40,750 homes, up 3.4% — the highest HAR has ever recorded
Months of inventory: 5.5 months
Days on market: 53 days, up from 50 a year ago
Pending sales: 8,215, up 2.6%
If you're buying
Five and a half months of inventory is the textbook definition of a balanced market. For most of the last four years you were competing against six other offers and waiving things you shouldn't have waived. You're not doing that this month.
What that buys you in practice: an option period you actually use, a repair request that doesn't get laughed at, and a seller who will talk about closing costs. Homes are averaging 53 days on the market. A house that's been sitting 60 or 70 days has a seller who has already had the hard conversation with their agent. That's your house to negotiate on.
One caution, because "record inventory" is a Houston-wide number and you don't buy Houston-wide. The $250,000 to $500,000 range moved 4,690 homes last month. That band is still busy. Above a million, sales are up 9.4% year over year and moving faster than most people assume.
On financing: HAR cites a 30-year average of 6.54%, down from 6.72% a year ago. What that does to your actual number depends on your credit, your down payment and your loan type — get that answer from a licensed lender, not from a headline.
If you're selling
Here's the part most agents will soften: you have 40,750 competitors, and the market is not going to fix your price for you.
Homes are absolutely still selling — 8,340 of them last month, and pending sales rose 2.6%, so the buyers are out there. But the listings that sit are, almost without exception, priced against last spring's optimism instead of this month's data. If you're two weeks in with no showings, that isn't a marketing problem. That's price.
And if what you own is a townhome or a condo, this is a different conversation entirely. That segment ran 9.1 months of inventory in July, with sales down 9% and the median price down 3.7% to $211,000. Nine months of supply is a buyer's market by any definition. I'd rather tell you that before you list than in month four of a listing.
The honest take
The word you'll hear all month is "balanced," and for once it's the right word. A market where a buyer can ask for repairs and a seller can still get a fair price is a healthier market than the one we all white-knuckled through in 2021. Balanced isn't bad news. It's just news that requires you to actually negotiate.
Second: be careful with national headlines this month. Nationally, single-family sales over the last twelve months came in 20.1% below the same stretch ending in 2019. Houston's are back to normal volume. "The housing market" on the evening news is usually not ours, and trading our numbers for theirs has cost people real money in both directions.
Third, and this is the one I'd underline: a record is a moment, not a fixture. Inventory this high is what July looked like, not what next spring is promised to look like. I'm not going to tell you to hurry. I'm telling you what's true right now so you can make the call on your own timeline.
Straight from HAR
All figures come from the Houston Association of REALTORS® July 2026 Housing Market Update. You can read HAR's full report and charts or download the one-page snapshot (PDF).
If you want to know what all of this means for your street, your price band, and your actual timeline — that's a twenty-minute conversation, and I'm happy to have it whether you're moving this year or just thinking out loud.
If you have any questions, call me — 281.944.5484. LaShambra Ewing, MBA, Broker Associate, Keller Williams Realty Southwest. Serving Houston and surrounding communities.
