> why would the relative ranking matter?

Trying to compare competitiveness of various markets on where builders are going to invest their money building?

> It's margin > margin of alternative investments of similar scale and risk profile.

Homebuilders want to build homes. They'll build where its profitable for them to build. Lots of markets are facing downturns in new construction, but home builders are still choosing markets like Austin more than tons of other markets.

> Your claim is that falling prices aren’t leading to less development.

I never said such a thing, although I do think you're potentially thinking in too black and white on it. In fact, I think it was quite clear I was talking about comparing the Austin homebuilding market to other markets with my statement "Austin market versus other markets though".

> As demand is satisfied, prices go down and supply creation slows down or even stops

I think we're still far from demand actually being satiated in the Austin area. Its still the 6th most growing metro in the US, even with housing construction dropping an estimated 15% for 2026.

If builders were really heavily dissuaded from building in Austin, if margins were really that terrible compared to the rest of the country, why would it be the 6th largest spot of housing growth in the US? Shouldn't all those builders decide to invest elsewhere?

I agree, margins are probably less than they were or were projected to be compared to just a few years ago. And I agree that's probably one of the biggest drivers of new construction cooling a bit. But the questions I was answering were:

Is Dr Horton building homes in Austin?

Are the margins in Austin pulling down their average margin?

The answer to the first is obvious and easy. The answer to the second is more complicated, but if it was truly dragging down their average margin in any significant way wouldn't they have just stopped and invested in building in the higher margin areas?

Dropping a bit from being one of the highest rates in the country still puts it at one of the highest rates in the country.

Looking at this data:

https://constructioncoverage.com/research/cities-investing-m...

If housing starts in Austin drop 15% for 2026, as some places are estimating, that puts Austin from 32,294 to 27,453 new homes added. It changes its national rank in this dataset from #6 to...#6.

> Is Dr Horton building homes in Austin?

Yes, a ton.

https://www.drhorton.com/texas/austin

> That could explain high profit while dissuading new construction in Austin.

Given they're still building a ton in Austin, there doesn't seem to be a dissuasion for building there. I do not have any idea about their average margin in the Austin market versus other markets though, but if that was a major decider on whether to build or not the answer is they're still choosing to build.

> Texas led the nation in job creation in 2025, adding more nonfarm jobs than any other state and setting multiple employment records

https://www.wfaa.com/article/money/business/everything-bigge...

As someone who has lived here for a long while, it seems like there are lots of jobs in a lot of industries here. We're not all oil riggers and cowboys.

Practically everything is something you will need to pay for in the end. You probably spent money on an internet connection, electricity, and computing equipment to write this comment. Are you intending to make a profit from commenting here?

You don't need to run something like this against a paid API provider. You could easily rework this to run against a local agent hosted on hardware you own. A number of not-stupid-expensive consumer GPUs can run some smaller models locally at home for not a lot of money. You can even play videogames with those cards after.

Get this: sometimes people write code and tinker with things for fun. Crazy, I know.