MW SpaceX employees now have enough wealth on paper to buy every home in this Texas city
Andrew Keshner
2025 set an all-time high for first-time buyers who used financial assets to buy a home or fund a down payment, according to the National Association of Realtors
The SpaceX IPO could change the game on high-end real estate in Texas - and elsewhere.
The SpaceX IPO is creating a whole new round of deep-pocketed home buyers - and deepening the gulf between high-end housing markets and everyday real estate.
Austin, Texas-based real-estate agent Matt Holm is already helping some SpaceX employees with their home search. Friday - when a record-breaking initial public offering kicked off trading of SpaceX's stock $(SPCX)$ - marked "a pretty good one-day bump to millionaires and billionaires in one town," said Holm, team lead of the Holm Team with Compass Real Estate $(COMP)$.
These newly wealthy-on-paper buyers are checking out bungalows and high-rise apartments with asking prices around $1.2 million to $1.5 million. Their plan is to borrow against their locked-up shares in order to pay for the homes in cash, Holm explained. He's expecting to work with at least 10 to 20 SpaceX employees over the next year - and most will be first-time buyers.
Though Austin is over 350 miles away from SpaceX's main operations near the Mexican border, it's a 40-minute flight away and chock full of SpaceX employees, their families and others working in Elon Musk's orbit of companies, Holm noted. "This SpaceX event is going to have a massive effect on Austin," he said.
SpaceX's stock started trading Friday at $150, which was 11% above its IPO price. At that share price, the company was valued at $1.96 trillion. It closed at $160.95, giving the company a $2.1 trillion market value.
To be clear, SpaceX employees haven't come into an instant cash windfall. Due to lockup periods, they may be sidelined from selling shares for weeks or months. But buying a home is not a quick purchase either.
Here's a hypothetical peek at some of the money about to pour into Texas real estate: If SpaceX employees pooled their money from the IPO, they could buy around 40% of all the homes in San Antonio, according to Redfin estimates - even the ones that aren't for sale. Or they could buy every home in McAllen, a city of roughly 150,000 people located near SpaceX's Starbase headquarters - and still have $74 billion left over.
It's a theoretical scenario, noted Chen Zhao, Redfin's head of economics research. But the SpaceX IPO will have serious knock-on impacts for real estate in Texas and elsewhere.
"Some employees will spend their windfalls on housing, and some will spend it on other things - but large liquidity events like this do have meaningful effects on local real-estate markets," said Zhao.
As employees cash out their shares, some will buy their first homes while others will buy vacation homes and investment properties, she said. "That increases demand in communities where these companies are based, and often drives up prices."
Business and real-estate professors studied what happened to surrounding neighborhoods when California-based companies went public between 1993 and 2017. They saw home sale prices increase 0.7% to 0.9% near headquarters in the six months after events like an IPO and an end to share lockup periods.
There are relevant takeaways for the SpaceX IPO, said Mark Thibodeau, one of the authors of that study who is now at Florida International University's College of Business.
The impact is "hyperlocal," Thibodeau said. "IPO wealth doesn't wash over an entire metro area; it shows up in the specific neighborhoods where employees actually live, generally within commuting distance of where they work. For SpaceX, I'd watch the areas where they have the largest concentrations of employees."
Larger returns above the opening share price can echo in real-estate markets, he added. The extra price jump on SpaceX shares after "the largest IPO in history is exactly the configuration where we'd expect the housing response to be on the high end," Thibodeau said.
Holm may be seeing the impact in Austin, but other real-estate agents also see the impact elsewhere.
Brownsville, Texas, is the closest city to SpaceX's Starbase. Its 2024 median income was just over $50,000, and nearly one-quarter of residents live in poverty, according to the Census Bureau.
"SpaceX has already transformed the trajectory of Brownsville's economy, turning what was once viewed primarily as a border city into a growing center for innovation and opportunity," said Daniel Galvan, an agent with Coldwell Banker Commercial based in McAllen. The IPO will speed up Brownsville's shift, he said.
What the IPO means for the luxury market - and everyone else
The SpaceX IPO lands at a time when many home buyers face high prices and expensive borrowing costs.
It's been a tough haul for a while. In 2024, the national price of a single-family home was five times the median household income, according to Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies.
More recently, the spring home-buying season has been complicated by rising gas prices, higher mortgage rates and the war with Iran. There's been some encouraging top-line numbers lately, as existing-home sales in May sped up to the fastest pace seen in 2026.
Yet the numbers underneath show a more complicated reality: Those figures were led by sales over $1 million, according to the National Association of Realtors. Meanwhile, sales declined for homes under $250,000.
It's too soon to know if the SpaceX IPO will impact the broader housing market, said Jessica Lautz, NAR's deputy chief economist and vice president of research. But stock-market gains are clearly helping buyers: 2025 set an all-time high for first-time buyers who used financial assets to buy a home or fund a down payment, she said.
The place to watch the IPO's impact may be in the luxury market, which is the top 10% of homes and starts around the $1.3 million level, Lautz said.
"The luxury market has been a bright spot in today's housing market, and additional wealth generated through IPOs could further highlight the growing divide in the 'K-shaped' housing market," she said.
SpaceX was the big news for investors on Friday, but there are other massive IPOs still to come this year from artificial-intelligence companies Anthropic and OpenAI. Both have filed confidential paperwork to go public.
Assuming those AI-related IPOs occur, Thibodeau said home buyers and sellers should watch for Bay Area employee hubs "to see pressure on house prices beginning at the filing date and continuing through listing and lockup expiration."
-Andrew Keshner
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(END) Dow Jones Newswires
June 13, 2026 09:00 ET (13:00 GMT)
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