A longtime Houston-area new home tour will feature more than 650 properties as the organizer hopes to drum up interest in what some builders say is an uninspired start to the traditional spring selling season.
Johnson Development Co.'s 13th annual Best of the Burbs home tour opens Tuesday and continues through the end of May. The tour will include 15 Johnson developments, and the single-family homes and townhouses on the tour range in price from below $300,000 to more than $1 million, the company said.
Prospective buyers can tour the homes at their convenience, with events planned at the various developments throughout April and May.
The spring selling season is typically the busiest time in residential real estate as families buy homes to have ample time to get settled in before the start of the new school year. But the U.S. new home market has been sluggish in recent months.
While mortgage rates near 7% aren't historically high, they're elevated compared to what they were during the pandemic, and that's enough for some consumers to hold off, said Justin Benefield, a finance professor and academic director for the Winchester Institute for Real Estate Finance at Auburn University in Alabama.
"A lot of first-time buyers don't have that historical context, and they say, 'Whoa, rates are crazy-high. I don't want to buy right now," Benefield said in an interview. "There's a lot of uncertainty about financial decision-making."
Sales of new homes increased in February, according to government data released this week, but costs for labor and materials are driving up home prices, Benefield said. Even after offering incentives to make monthly payments less costly, some builders note muted demand.
KB Home, one of the largest U.S. homebuilders, said it is lowering prices and revenue projections because the start of the selling season didn't meet expectations. Lennar also cited the soft market.
Houston-based Johnson, a residential and commercial master developer, is marking half a century in business this year. It said its first home tour in 2013 featured more than 300 homes in seven developments.
"The tour is designed to showcase the full range of options our communities have to offer, helping buyers get a true sense of what’s available," said Christen Johnson, the firm's senior vice president of marketing, in an email.
The 10,800-acre Sienna in Fort Bend County, Texas, is set to be one of the developments featured on this year's home tour. In 2024, 585 homes sold at Sienna, earning it No. 22 on a list of the top-selling U.S. master-planned communities, according to the RCLCO consulting firm. But Sienna sales fell 3% from 2023, according to RCLCO, and competition is popping up across the region, one of the nation's fastest-growing, according to the latest U.S. Census data.
Model homes on the tour will be open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Saturday and noon to 6 p.m. on Sundays, though prospective buyers might need to arrange tours of completed homes with the individual builders. Admission to the tour is free. For more information, visit the tour's website.