Southwest Houston & Fort Bend

Fort Bend’s median home was built in 2005 and 83% of the county is detached single-family, which makes this the zone with the most two-story, two-system suburban product per square mile. It also spans forty years of construction, from 1970s Quail Valley to houses in Fulshear that were framed last year.

Sugar Land’s median home was built in 1994, with First Colony and Sugar Creek older still, and the pattern there is a house on its second or third air handler with the original ductwork still draped through the attic: the equipment got replaced, the runs did not. Missouri City splits between 1970s Quail Valley and 2000s Sienna. Richmond and Rosenberg are the fastest-growing part of the county, 2010s-heavy, on Brazos River bottomland. Fulshear is 92% built since 2010 — the purest new-construction page on this site, where the only duct question is whether the builder’s dust ever left.

This is also the zone where the difference between cleaning and replacement is most often a money question rather than a flood one: a 1994 house in Sugar Land on original flex is at thirty years, past any rated life, and a $700 cleaning that buys three more summers is not a saving against the replacement it delays.

Areas in This Zone