A new subdivision near an elementary school in Brownsville has addresses that don’t appear on Google Maps yet, even though it’s about 15 minutes from downtown.

The single-family homes in the Central Park Community near Raquel Peña Elementary School were in various stages of development – from vacant grassy lots to poured foundations, wood frames, and many finished houses. Meanwhile, bunches of wild sunflowers and wheat from old agricultural fields still grew tall near an electrical pole. 

In this neighborhood sits a newly built house that’s on the market. It spans 1,392 square feet and features three bedrooms, two baths, a yard, and a one-car garage. On Sept. 20, it was listed for $259,900.

That’s about the median home sale price for the Brownsville-Harlingen metropolitan statistical area for August 2025. 

More expensive neighborhoods, same city 

But not much more than a decade ago, Bruno Zavaleta III, president of the Brownsville-South Padre Island Board of Realtors and founder of Zavaleta Realty, regularly sold homes in the region for about $100,000. 

“Now, that house is $175,000 or $200,000. But that’s what it is,” Zavaleta said. “You want the nice restaurants, you want to compete with McAllen, that’s kind of where we are.” 

In the Central Park Community subdivision, a few three-bedroom homes remain around the $260,000 mark. 

“There’s another neighborhood not far from here that’s also being developed with a lot of these similar-sized homes because of the price point,” Zavaleta said. 

Median home sales price data show that in the past several years, the Brownsville metro area has outpaced McAllen, and the gap continues to grow. The initial spike in demand was directly tied to billionaire Elon Musk’s decision to build SpaceX in Brownsville. 

“In 2021, Elon put that tweet out that said, ‘Hey, everybody move to Brownsville,’ and literally our phones rang off the hook the next day,” Zavaleta said. “That kind of changed our market overnight.” 

One investor drove from Georgia to see and purchase several rental properties in Brownsville in anticipation of a flow of new residents hoping to either work for or be close to SpaceX, he said. 

At the time, renting a two-bedroom townhome in Brownsville would cost about $800 a month before the SpaceX migration and remote workers during the COVID-19 pandemic – now it’s closer to $1,400. 

Then the liquified natural gas export terminal development kicked the market into high gear, Zavaleta said. 

A four-bedroom home on the north side of Brownsville that is 2,400 square feet used to cost about $275,000. But the combination of a hot housing market, higher labor costs, and inflation for construction materials has shown up in the new price tag. 

“That same house is now about $420,000, and that’s what we sell them for,” Zavaleta said. 

More homes than buyers, for now 

But in the Brownsville metro area, there’s more than six months of housing inventory. Six months is considered a healthy, stable market. More than six months, then it’s a buyer’s market, and fewer than six, it’s a seller’s market.

In recent months, Zavaleta said he’s seen more price reductions in his email inbox on listings in Brownsville. 

By Sept. 27, the asking price for the new three-bedroom home in the Brownsville subdivision was cut $10,000, going from $259,900 to $249,900. 

In some ways, it’s a much different housing market in the McAllen-Edinburg-Mission metro area, but in others, there are similarities. 

The McAllen market also has about seven to eight months of housing inventory. And it’s affecting how some realtors negotiate to close the deal – if they can. 

At the end of a block in an older subdivision in San Juan, near a middle school, public park, and irrigation canal, a new single-family home is for sale. It spans 1,424 square feet and features three bedrooms, two baths, a yard, and a one-car garage. 

It was listed for $265,000 on Aug. 7 and was under contract with a buyer by Sept. 22, records show. 

That’s roughly the median sale price for single-family homes in the McAllen metro, where houses often take about 90 days to sell.

“Most homes right now are averaging days on the market, anywhere between 4.5 months to 6 months right now,” said Ramon I. Pecina III, president of the Greater McAllen Association of Realtors and the founder of Zapphire Real Estate Group. “Our inventory [of homes for sale] is the highest it’s ever been.” 

It’s a combination of a slower pace of individuals buying homes due to high interest rates, more housing stock from new construction outpacing how quickly homes are sold, and fewer first-time home buyers being able to qualify for mortgages since the average home is much more expensive. 

How to get from for sale to sold 

To help move the sale along, Pecina, who doubles as a home builder, ensures some move-in-ready touches: USB-plug outlets in all the bedrooms, larger-than-standard front doors, electric fireplaces, and fans in every room. 

Over the past year, about 800 new homes were listed for sale in the McAllen metro area, he said. 

Pecina’s general market strategy is to develop new construction in older, more established neighborhoods where there are open lots.

For example, a nearly identical single-family home next door to the new construction in San Juan near the Stephen F. Austin Middle School is not yet completed – and when it is, that will go on the market too. 

“People want to live in older neighborhoods, it’s just that there’s no new homes there really available,” Pecina said, especially for residents who have connections to the Rio Grande Valley and decided to move back. 

For example, Pecina is working on an 18-lot development in Alton with homes in the $250,000 price point. He hopes to break ground over the next two months. But he bought that land three years ago; if he had tried to buy it this year, it would have cost at least 25% more. And that’s just the land, not counting labor or construction materials. 

“I always had those clients who say, ‘Oh, we’re going to wait, let’s see what the market does. We’re going to see if the interest rates go down.’ Well, the interest rates are not going down too much,” Pecina said. “Building materials have actually gone up a bit over the last couple of months with all the tariff stuff going on.”  

RGV housing tracks state, national trends

And it’s not just South Texas where this phenomenon of higher interest rates, more expensive homes, and more available housing stock than buyer demand is happening. 

Yanling Mayer is a housing research economist with the Texas A&M University Texas Real Estate Research Center. 

Over the past decade, a wave of new single-family home construction emerged as builders took out low-interest loans and buyers financed mortgages at record-low rates, Mayer said.

“But things have changed in the last few years, especially with high mortgage rates and home prices at a still record high,” Mayer said. “Affordability has been a challenge.” 

In the McAllen metro area, the median household income is about $53,000, while the median home price is about $250,000. That means the average home is five times the salary of a two-person household. 

“For folks who have modest to low-paying jobs, this picture of affordable housing is not that pretty,” she said.