Houston, Texas hotel market

A hurricane hangover, not a slump

Houston's trailing twelve months, $1.85B of room receipts, are about 4.5% below the prior year. The prior year is the problem. 2024 receipts hit $1.94B, up 12% over 2023, and much of that gain was storm demand: the May 2024 derecho and then Hurricane Beryl in July put displaced families, adjusters and repair crews into hotel rooms for weeks. July 2024 alone reported $185.7M against $127.7M the following July, and August ran $170.9M against $127.5M. Measure 2025 against the storm year and it reads down 8%; measure it against 2023 and it is up 3%.

The filings show this cycle twice. The market's five biggest months since 2017 include July 2024 (Beryl) and October 2017, when Harvey's displaced households were still living in hotels. Storm months are real revenue, but they are not a trend, and Houston's comparison windows should always be read with a storm calendar in hand.

The current momentum is unambiguous. First-quarter 2026 receipts were $550.6M, up 11.8% year over year, and March 2026 came in at $237.3M, the largest single month in the nine-plus years of filings we hold, 19% above the previous record set the March before. That gain was broad: the Hilton Americas was up 26% for the month, the Marriott Marquis 14%, the Four Seasons 36%, the Post Oak 32%, the Hyatt Regency 37%.

Sources: CoStar: Houston hotels ride a wave of spring momentum

Medicine, energy, and now the world

Houston's trailing-year roster reads steady rather than distressed. The two convention anchors held: the 1,200-room Hilton Americas at $68.9M (down 2.6%) and the 1,000-room Marriott Marquis at $67.7M (down 0.7%), with both storm-year comps working against them. Luxury grew: the Post Oak up 4.4% to $46.6M and the Four Seasons up 8.1% to $37.0M. The medical-center cluster did what it always does; MD Anderson's Rotary House grew 5.6% and the Marriott Medical Center held flat.

The forward calendar is unusually loaded. NRG Stadium hosts seven FIFA World Cup matches in June 2026, with roughly half a million visitors projected and boosters estimating a spend measured in billions; treat those as promoters' numbers, but the room-nights are real and they land the month after this data ends. Downtown, the George R. Brown Convention Center is one year into a $2B transformation whose first phase, a 700,000 square foot south building with the largest ballroom in Texas, is targeted for 2028, the same year the Republican National Convention comes to the building. Unlike Austin's rebuild, the center stays open throughout.

Sources: Houston First: the George R. Brown's $2B transformation · Smart Meetings: World Cup Houston, seven matches at NRG · KHOU: downtown's final transformations before the World Cup

A huge base, barely growing

Houston is the state's largest hotel market by every measure: 742 hotels filed room tax in the trailing year, with 68,260 registry rooms, up about 1,600 (2.4%) from the year before. Eighty-five registrations filed for the first time, but the churn is mostly operators and taxpayer numbers rather than buildings; the Marriott Westchase, for example, appears three times in the year's roster because it changed filing entities twice, and the counts treat all three registrations as one 604-room building. Meaningful subtractions are real too: the 297-room Hilton Houston Westchase, $13.5M in the prior year, stopped filing entirely.

Short-term rentals took $214.4M in the trailing year, a 10.4% share of measured lodging revenue. The share has tripled since 2017, when it was 3.3%, but the growth is over for now: STR revenue has been essentially flat since 2023 while the hotel side swung with the storms.

The buyer's read, and the data notes

Underwriting Houston starts with normalizing the base years. Strip the storm months before trending anything: 2017 and 2024 both overstate the market, and a deal priced off either will disappoint. What remains after normalization is a market growing modestly on an enormous, diversified base, with medicine as the stabilizer, energy as the swing factor, and an event calendar (a record March, the World Cup in June, the RNC and a transformed convention center in 2028) that keeps handing the market one-time boosts. Treat each boost as exactly that. The structural risk is the one the filings keep proving: hurricanes are part of this market's revenue history in both directions, and insurance costs price that in permanently.

Data notes: no single large filing artifact distorts the current comparison windows, which is notable because most big Texas markets have one this year. At Houston's scale the flags that do exist are small and numerous: the growth rate shown above excludes roughly $15M of flagged months spread across dozens of properties, under 1% of the total, and barely moves the needle. All figures are self-reported state tax filings, unaudited, and restated when operators amend.

Sources: Houston First: the George R. Brown's $2B transformation