San Antonio’s housing market is still swinging a pretty hefty hammer. The metro just landed at No. 10 nationwide for new home construction in a fresh ranking from ConsumerAffairs. Between January and February 2026, the area logged roughly 1,815 new residential building permits and about 1,685 newly built homes sold, putting San Antonio among the busiest construction markets in the country.
The ConsumerAffairs research team ranked 150 metropolitan areas using two equally weighted metrics: total new residential building permits from the U.S. Census and new construction home sales from Zillow. The idea was to pinpoint where building activity is most concentrated, according to ConsumerAffairs. Texas flexed hard, claiming four of the top 10 spots, with Dallas at No. 1 and San Antonio joining Austin and Houston on the leaderboard.
Policy Tweaks Help Supercharge Texas Builders
So what’s fueling the surge? ConsumerAffairs points to recent policy and permitting shifts that lowered some hurdles for smaller multifamily projects. “Previously, buildings with more than two residential housing units had to comply with the International Building Code... The revised code allows buildings with up to eight units to be constructed with looser regulations,” the report notes, crediting the change with juicing development in Dallas and the surrounding region, per ConsumerAffairs. Dallas alone issued more than 11,300 building permits and saw roughly 3,009 new-build sales in early 2026, underscoring just how hot the Texas construction engine is running.
For San Antonio Buyers, New Doesn’t Mean Wildly Pricier
For locals actually trying to snag a place, the report offers one small sigh of relief: new construction in San Antonio is not coming with an eye-watering markup. The ConsumerAffairs analysis found that in February the metro’s median sale price for new builds was only $950 higher than the median for existing homes. At the same time, the greater San Antonio-New Braunfels metro authorized nearly 15,000 new residential units in 2024, according to CultureMap San Antonio, giving buyers more options than in many peer cities.
Bottom Line: Strong Pipeline, Big Gap To Fill
A healthy stream of building permits and new-build sales suggests San Antonio’s housing pipeline is in far better shape than in many markets. Still, experts caution that national construction overall will have to move faster to close the long-running housing supply gap. The building permit data behind the ConsumerAffairs ranking comes from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Building Permits Survey, the primary source used in federal housing datasets, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
