Courtesy of the City of McAllen
Long recognized for its affordable housing and low cost of living, McAllen, TX, emerged as a COVID-19 pandemic-era boomtown—but that surge has since reversed.
McAllen a city of 146,000 people situated just a few miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border—experienced the sharpest decline in popularity among local homebuyers over the past six years, according to a new report from Realtor.com®.
The report analyzed the 100 largest U.S. metros for cross-market demand. Economists looked at views of Realtor.com listings, comparing how many out-of-town visitors were looking at homes in a city versus how many locals were shopping for properties elsewhere between April and June 2025.
According to the latest data, during the spring season, 65% of online home shopping traffic in McAllen went to listings outside the city, representing a 30% increase from 2019—the biggest jump among all the analyzed metros.
Realtor.com economist Jiayi Xu explains that McAllen’s drop in homebuyer interest could be attributed to a combination of factors.
“Like many affordable markets, McAllen, TX, attracted new residents during the pandemic due to its low cost of living,” says Xu. “However, as home prices rose and return-to-office trends resumed, some of that migration has started to reverse.”
Lower affordability, higher unemployment
In June 2025, the median home list price in McAllen was $274,950, up more than 38% from the same period in 2019.
Meanwhile, the unemployment rate in the border city reached 6% in May of this year, compared with 5.4% six years ago.
In light of rising home prices and shrinking job opportunities in McAllen, local homebuyers began casting covetous glances toward more busting nearby metros like Austin and San Antonio, where there is an abundance of high-paying work.
According to the Realtor.com analysis, McAllen residents’ out-of-market online home searches directed at Austin and San Antonio surged from just 4.8% and 16.1%, respectively, to 10.7% and 18.9% over the past six years.
Ironically, McAllen might be a victim of its own success, as rising home equity has likely enabled residents to relocate to higher-priced metros.
“Over the last six years, home prices in McAllen have climbed 65.6% on a price-per-square-foot basis, significantly increasing homeowner equity,” says Realtor.com senior economic research analyst Hannah Jones. “This equity growth may be providing some local homeowners with the flexibility to pursue employment opportunities in other parts of Texas.”
But according to Jones, it’s not all bad news for McAllen, located just across the Rio Grande from Mexico—an area that has been at the center of the ongoing border crisis.
“While the ‘border crisis’ narrative could nudge some buyers or employers away from McAllen, there is no evidence of a mass exodus of population,” she says. “The area’s housing market remains stable, and its relative affordability means that the area sees strong demand from out-of-metro buyers.”
Far from being an outlier, McAllen is emblematic of a wider post-pandemic shift reshaping Western housing markets.
As reflected in the latest cross-market demand study, over 65% of listing views from the West went to out-of-market homes in spring 2025—the highest rate among all regions.
This shift has taken the greatest toll on some of the nation’s hottest pandemic-era destinations, among them Phoenix, Spokane, WA, Fresno, CA, and Tucson, AZ.
Xu says that during the darkest days of the global calamity, those relatively affordable metros saw high levels of in-migration, serving as “escape valves” from costly West Coast cities, like California‘s San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, and Seattle.
“However, eroding affordability, coupled with return-to-office policies, now appears to be driving more people away,” notes the economist.
For example, the out-of-market share of listing views in Phoenix reached 70.5% this past spring, up 28.5% from six years ago, trailing only McAllen.
During the intervening years, the median list price in Phoenix shot up 36.8%, to $520,000 as of June of this year.
Snejana Farberov is a reporter at Realtor.com covering the U.S. housing market and the latest domestic real estate trends. She has worked as a general assignment journalist in New York City and Long Island for 16 years, writing for New York Post, Daily Mail, and News 12. Snejana earned bachelor’s degrees in journalism and Italian from St. John’s University, followed by a master’s degree from Columbia University School of Journalism.
Post courtesy of realtor.com.