Texas added roughly 2.6 million residents between 2020 and 2025, more than any other state, and led the nation in numeric growth again in 2025 with 391,243 new Texans. Dallas recorded 100 corporate headquarters announcements from 2018 through 2024, the most of any American city, with Austin adding 81 while the San Francisco Bay Area lost 156. Numbers like those eventually attach themselves to whoever predicted them in print.
The flows those numbers describe were two-sided, with the same CBRE data showing the San Francisco Bay Area losing 156 headquarters and Los Angeles 106 over the window Texas was gaining them.
One of the people on record is Shravan Parsi, the Austin-based CEO of American Ventures, whose May 2022 Forbes piece “Sweet Home Texas” declared the state ground zero for real estate investing and entrepreneurship. “With the kind of business and population growth occurring in Texas right now, I see continued best-in-class performance,” he wrote. A prediction that specific, made four years ago by a developer who has invested in roughly 4,400 multifamily units and multiple commercial properties, is now old enough to grade.
The Call as Shravan Parsi Made It
The 2022 piece rested on a stack of claims: Texas had grown almost 16% over the prior decade with about 1.9 million net in-migrants; six of the ten fastest-growing U.S. counties were Texan; corporate gravity was shifting, with “Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Oracle, and Tesla, to name but a few international conglomerates,” expanding or relocating to Austin; roughly 40% of Texas housing was renter-occupied; and apartment vacancy sat at 6%, which he read as room for renters rather than froth.
He even published his screening method: census data, lifestyle journalism, best-places-to-live surveys, and metro reports from HUD and firms like CBRE. A prediction assembled from public sources can be checked against public sources, which is what makes this one worth the exercise.
The Columns That Came in Right
On people and payrolls, the record has been kind to the thesis. The state closed 2024 with a record 14,318,700 nonfarm jobs and, in the governor’s office’s words, “the largest labor force ever in the state’s history at 15,575,900.” Texas held 54 Fortune 500 headquarters on the 2025 list, second only to California’s 58 after leading outright in 2024.
Investment capital, which fled every market when rates spiked, has circled back to his home metro first. Austin’s multifamily market opened 2026 with its strongest first-quarter sales since 2022, with institutional buyers taking roughly three-quarters of the volume, a median price of $193,100 per unit, and cap rates settling into a 5.5% to 6.5% band. Buyers paying those prices after three years of falling rents are underwriting the same drivers the 2022 piece named.
The scorecard so far:
- Population growth: right. No state added more people over the prediction window.
- Corporate migration: right. Dallas and Austin led the country in headquarters announcements through 2024.
- Jobs: right. Record employment and labor force by the end of 2024.
- Rents and vacancy: wrong for three years. The performance he called best-in-class went through the worst rent slump of any large U.S. market before recovering.
The Wrinkle He Did Not Dwell On
What “Sweet Home Texas” underweighted was what Texas developers would do with all that conviction: build. Austin’s apartment stock grew by more than a third after 2020, and rents fell for twelve consecutive quarters, down 22% from their August 2023 peak by Redfin’s measure. The 6% vacancy he cited as capacity became 11.5% by early 2026, and Austin’s job engine cooled to a 1.3% annual pace, roughly 13,700 positions added in the year through February 2026, per Yardi Matrix.
Costs moved against owners too: Texans paid 60% more for property insurance in 2024 than in 2019, double the national increase, as the state’s share of billion-dollar storms climbed. Migration itself has cooled, with domestic arrivals falling to 67,299 in 2025, international migration nearly halving in the same year, and the state demographer warning that economic growth “isn’t probably going to be as hearty” as the historical run.
Shravan Parsi grades his own miss without much prompting. “I got the direction right and underweighted the builders,” he said.
“Texas absorbed everyone the country sent it, and then it had to absorb everything we built on their behalf,” he added. “The first part took the whole decade I predicted. The second part took three years I didn’t.”
The Hedge That Held
The 2022 piece contained its own insurance clause, easy to skip on first read. “I always say whether the economy is up or down, multifamily ground up developments or value-add investment projects provide great returns,” Shravan Parsi wrote, framing the asset class as cycle-resistant rather than rent-dependent. The distinction did real work: operators who bought Texas expecting uninterrupted rent growth spent 2023 through 2025 underwater on their assumptions, while the fundamentals he actually named, population, employment, and renter share, never stopped compounding. The renter base held through the whole slump, with national apartment vacancy ending the stretch below its long-run average even as Texas metros digested record deliveries.
Rents in Austin now sit only modestly above 2019 levels even as the metro holds hundreds of thousands more residents, which reads less like a failed market than a coiled one. Discounted rent on a growing population is an entry price, and the investors bidding up Austin assets in early 2026 appear to have read it that way.
What a Gradeable Call Is Worth
Most market commentary is written so it can never be wrong, which is why it is never quite right either. The 2022 piece named a state, a mechanism, and a set of measurable drivers, and four years of census releases, jobs reports, and rent surveys have been checking it ever since: direction confirmed, timeline punished, drivers intact. The builders who overshot the demand Parsi described handed Texas renters a three-year discount, the discount is now expiring as construction halves, and the population math that started the whole argument has not blinked.
There is a symmetry in the method, too, since the census releases and market reports Shravan Parsi named as his screening sources are the same documents now grading him. A forecast that survives its own correction is the kind worth re-reading, and this one’s next grading period is already underway.
