Best Housing Investments In The Oil States
Date：2016/11/03
Ingo Winzer , CONTRIBUTOR
NOV 1, 2016 @ 10:15 PM
[Forbes ]We’ve done the analysis, these are the Top 9 Best Investment places.
Quick Hits: Home prices and new construction will be especially strong around Dallas, Austin and San Antonio. Investments in single-family rentals are favored in Fort Bend and Montgomery Counties in Texas, and Cleveland County Oklahoma. The lack of rentals is most acute in Ascension Parish, Louisiana and in Fort Bend County. In Comal County, high home prices favor cutting single-family homes into multi-rental units. The volume of new mortgages will be high in the Texas counties, while the risk of default will be lower than average.
Open land first drew large numbers of settlers to Texas and Oklahoma, but today the important agricultural products, cattle and cotton are most efficiently farmed in big operations, so it’s no wonder that small-farm rural areas are emptying themselves into the big cities. Accelerating that trend, the modern oil industry – production, refining and engineering – is naturally a concentrated, business. And 200,000 people move to urban Texas every year.
All of which means that the need for housing in the oil states is growing faster in the cities than in the states themselves, and the easiest opportunities for investment are in the outer counties of the cities, rural not so long ago, where land and business costs are far cheaper than downtown.
Oil is only one part of the economy in this region, but it still swings the pace of local economic growth.
Comal County, Texas – San Antonio
Population growth has been quadruple the national average, job growth triple the average. Much of the growth has been in the retail and business services sectors as the corridor between San Antonio and Austin becomes developed. Many of these new jobs have relatively low pay, in an area which up to now has had a modest stock of rentals, a large number of veterans, and an older population. The fairly high home price to rent ratio suggests investments in apartment buildings or single-family homes that are cut into multiple rental units. I expect a 28 percent rise in home prices over the next three years, as well as a high level of new construction – 4,000 new single-family homes and 2,000 rentals.