Millionaire Renters Are Booming in Houston—Even Though Buying Is Within Reach

At first glance, The Langley could easily be mistaken for a luxury condominium tower.

The 20-story high-rise features spacious floor plans, Wolf gas ranges, and back service kitchens equipped with a second refrigerator, dishwasher, and sink.

But the units are for rent—and at around $10,000 a month to start, they aren’t cheap. That might be easier to explain in one of the country’s most expensive housing markets, where buying a comparable home can require several million dollars and an even bigger monthly payment. 

But The Langley is in Houston, where even the upper end of the market remains tantalizingly within reach for many high earners.

Through September, the metro’s median list price was $356,173, according to Realtor.com® data. The threshold for the top 5% of listings was about $1.19 million.

And yet Houston has seen the fastest growth in millionaire renters of any major metro in a recent analysis from RentCafe. Between 2020 and 2024, the number of renter households earning at least $1 million surged 1,189%, compared with a 229% increase nationwide.

While millionaire renters have also multiplied in expensive markets like Seattle and Los Angeles, Houston strips away the easy explanation that renting is just a response to prohibitively expensive home prices.

If wealthy households still have the means to buy, why are some choosing to rent instead?

Why rent when buying is still cheap?

Corey Lipscomb, a high-rise specialist with Martha Turner Sotheby’s International Realty, who markets The Langley, calls it Houston’s “premier first five-star luxury lease building.”

From his perspective, the appeal is straightforward: Residents can get what they would expect from luxury ownership without taking on all of its obligations.

“It’s just a much more carefree, lock-and-leave option,” Lipscomb says.

He points to ongoing ownership expenses like property taxes and association fees, as well as the possibility of special assessments in luxury condo ownership. Single-family homes, meanwhile, come with regular upkeep of major systems like roofs and foundations—not to mention Houston-specific risks like flooding.

“People come through and they feel like it’s more of a condominium product,” says Corey Lipscomb, who markets The Langley. “It’s just really high quality, beautiful finishes, spacious floor plans.” (The Langley) A separate back service kitchen gives residents extra prep, storage, and delivery space that can be closed off from the main kitchen. (The Langley) “It feels more like a designer came in and curated something that is more lasting,” Lipscomb says of the building’s finishes. (The Langley)

And all those responsibilities have gotten considerably more expensive in the time millionaire renters have surged in the area.

Average Texas homeowners insurance premiums alone climbed about 66% between 2020 and 2024, from $1,987 to $3,291, according to the Texas Department of Insurance (TDI). And in Harris County, median property taxes paid were up 27% in the 2020 to 2024 period compared with the previous five years.

“Renting has become a deliberate choice rather than a stopgap, as elevated mortgage rates, property taxes, and insurance costs change the rent-versus-buy math,” explains Hannah Jones, senior economist at Realtor.com and a Houstonian herself.

That flips the conventional logic of renting on its head. While it’s often treated as what people do until they can afford to buy, at the upper end of Houston’s market, some households may instead be paying for the freedom not to own.

More high earners are finding their way to Houston

That flexibility becomes especially valuable when affluent households are in transition—something Houston has had no shortage of.

Between July 2020 and July 2024, the Houston metropolitan area added roughly 609,000 residents, an 8.5% increase that brought its population to nearly 7.8 million, according to Census estimates

Much of that growth came from migration. An analysis by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development found that between April 2020 and October 2023, net migration accounted for roughly two-thirds of the region's population gains.

At the same time, Space City's upper-income market has been expanding. Harris County added roughly 78,800 households earning incomes of at least $200,000 between the 2020 and 2024 ACS five-year estimates—more than any other county in Texas.

“As a Houstonian, I can wax poetic about all the ways Houston is excellent, but the data points to a few simple reasons people keep coming,” Jones says. “Houston has a robust, diversified economy and relatively affordable housing.”

Houston’s job growth has outpaced the national rate since at least 2017, excluding the pandemic-distorted 2020, according to the Greater Houston Partnership.

But arriving somewhere and knowing where or how you want to live there are two different things—a distinction that Jones says may explain the city’s surge in affluent renters.

“High-earning newcomers may also rent first and buy later which would temporarily boost the renter count,” she explains.

It’s a phenomenon that Lipscomb says he sees firsthand.

“It’s a good interim option for people that are moving to town, that maybe haven’t found what area they want to be in or the exact house that they have in mind,” he says.

He adds that he’s worked with clients who have sold large homes, are remodeling, or are waiting for new luxury developments to be completed. They span ages and life stages, from doctors and families to empty nesters and people going through divorces.

So choosing to rent when buying is an option isn’t necessarily a rejection of homeownership. It can give households time to figure out what comes next without locking themselves into the wrong move.

Houston kept building—and expanded the menu

In 2024, Houston demographer Dan Potter warned that the city risked becoming "the next luxury city," as a result of the region's chaning population and development patterns.

And by one reading, the rise of millionaire renters looks to be confirmation of that trend. Houston's rental market has been expanding rapidly, and much of that growth has been concentrated at the higher end.

Class A apartment inventory increased nearly 70% between 2017 and late 2022, according to ApartmentData.com figures reported by Bisnow, compared with 13% growth for the apartment market overall. And in 2024, Class A properties accounted for the majority of Houston's apartment absorption, according to Colliers.

Yet there's another side to Houston's construction boom.

The metro has added people, jobs, and high-income households—all of the ingredients that can put upward pressure on housing costs. And yet, median list prices are about 5% below their 2022 peak, while the threshold for luxury homes is roughly 16% below its 2021 peak.

“Houston felt the same pandemic-era tightening as much of the country,” Jones explains. “But builders responded quickly with new supply.”

That was even possible because the city had a secret weapon that most others didn't: an exceptionally permissive development environment. Houston is the largest U.S. city without a traditional zoning code, giving builders more room to add townhomes, apartments, and single-family homes as demand changes.

So, as population grew, builders were able to respond with new housing. More than 25,000 apartments were delivered in the year ending in mid-2024, the highest annual completion volume Houston had seen since the 1980s, according to RealPage.

And while developers catered to affluent renters, Jones emphasizes that Houston's supply response as a whole has helped preserve housing choices across income levels.

“Ample supply means households at many price points can afford to either buy or rent here, and that is what makes growth possible,” she explains.

The pricing data are consistent with that argument. Asking rents have retreated from their 2023 high, while the 95th-percentile listing threshold has fallen to about $1.19 million—below its 2020 level.

Of course, that doesn't mean Houston has solved the affordability problems that Potter warned about two years ago, or that luxury construction alone brought prices down. But it does show a market where housing prices have eased from their peaks despite substantial population growth.

As Jones puts it, “That says less about Houston than about how much choice abundant supply gives people at every income level."

And for some of Houston’s wealthiest households, that means having enough money to buy—and renting anyway.