Grayson County Just Landed a $40 Billion Chip Plant. Home Prices Fell Anyway.

"We're seeing more buyers being activated," Denison Realtor JD McLeod told KTEN in June 2026, describing a market where builders who hadn't sold a house in a year were finally cutting prices to something buyers would bite on. That's not the sentence you'd expect from a county that just landed the largest economic development project in Texas history.

Texas Instruments held its ribbon cutting on a $40 billion semiconductor fabrication campus in Sherman on December 17, 2025, with Governor Greg Abbott on hand to call it exactly that kind of moment. The plant is expected to create roughly 3,000 direct jobs and produce tens of millions of chips a day for cars, phones, and data centers. A few months later, GlobalWafers brought its own Phase II wafer plant online nearby, a $4 billion addition to a project that already cost $3.5 billion to get off the ground, supplying silicon to TI and other chipmakers. Sherman's mayor has talked about the multiplier effect, the idea that every primary manufacturing job tends to pull two or three more jobs into the surrounding economy.

If you've been watching Grayson County from a distance, the story writing itself is simple: massive investment, thousands of jobs, home prices should be climbing. Zillow's numbers say the opposite is happening right now. As of June 30, 2026, the average home value in Grayson County was $289,706, down 4.9% over the past year. Sherman itself was down 6.9% to $256,924. Denison, as of its April 2026 reading, was down 6.4% to $229,340. That's not a typo and it's not a data error. It's a county absorbing a supply problem that arrived faster than the jobs did.

The Investment Is Real. So Is the Contradiction.

None of the underlying facts about Sherman's transformation are in dispute. TI broke ground on its four-fab campus in May 2022 and has described the finished site as likely to become the largest electronics production facility in Texas. GlobalWafers' Sherman operation, doing business locally as GlobiTech, is on track to support around 1,500 jobs and produce up to 1.2 million wafers a month at full buildout. Between the two companies, Grayson County is looking at close to $47 billion in committed capital investment inside a handful of years, in a county that had roughly 135,500 residents as recently as 2020.

That kind of number is why land broker Rex Glendenning, who has spent decades selling tracts around Sherman, has called the TI investment the biggest real thing that has ever happened to the city. It's also why housing analyst Ted Wilson of Residential Strategies has watched half-million-dollar listings show up in Van Alstyne and call it stunning for a market that used to be a value play.

So the jobs are coming. The investment is real. And home values are falling anyway. Understanding why requires looking at what happened between the groundbreaking and the ribbon cutting, not what's happening after it.

Builders Didn't Wait for the Jobs. They Built for Them.

The gap between announcement and hiring is where the current price softness actually comes from. Sherman has issued permits for more than 4,000 new homes since the TI announcement first went public, years before most of those 3,000 direct jobs were filled. Developers didn't wait to see if the demand would materialize. They positioned for it early, the same way they always do when a market gets a headline this large.

The clearest example is Risland US Holdings' Mantua project, a 3,000-acre master-planned community straddling U.S. Highway 75 between Anna and Van Alstyne. The first phase sold through more than 220 lots to homebuilders before a second phase of 324 more homes even cleared city review. K. Hovnanian has moved into Howe. Builders have been migrating north toward Sherman for the better part of a decade, chasing land that was cheaper than Collin County long before TI showed up. The chip plant accelerated a trend that was already underway. It didn't start it.

That timing matters because building takes years and hiring takes longer. A subdivision permitted in 2022 or 2023 is closing out now, in 2026, right as the workforce TI needs is still ramping toward its full 3,000-person target. The homes arrived on schedule. The buyers to fill all of them haven't, at least not yet.

Two Data Sources, Two Different Stories

Here's where it gets genuinely useful for anyone comparing Grayson County to somewhere else in North Texas. Zillow's home value index, which tracks like-for-like property values over time, shows the countywide decline described above. Redfin's transaction data tells a different story on the surface: a median sale price of $323,000 over the three months ending in April 2026, up 4.1% from the same period a year earlier, with 239 homes sold that month compared to 201 the year before.

Both can be true at once, and the reason is worth sitting with. Redfin's median tracks whatever actually closes in a given month, and when more new, larger homes are closing relative to older resales, the median can rise even while the value of any individual home is falling. Zillow's index tries to isolate what a comparable home is worth over time, independent of what happens to be selling. In a market flooded with fresh construction, that's the number that better answers the question a buyer is actually asking: is this house worth more or less than it would have been a year ago?

Neither source is wrong. They're measuring different things, and a buyer who only sees the Redfin number walks away thinking the market already priced in the TI boom. It hasn't, at least not evenly, and that's the gap worth understanding before you write an offer.

This Fits a Bigger Texas Story, Not Just a Sherman One

Grayson County's softness isn't happening in isolation. Homebuilders across the Dallas-Fort Worth metro started 17.7% fewer homes in the last quarter of 2025 than the year before, and single-family permits statewide fell roughly 10.3% between January and October of 2025, a steeper drop than the national decline. Builders overbuilt the entry-level segment across Texas coming out of the pandemic, and they're now working through that inventory everywhere, not just north of Dallas.

That context matters because it tells you the Grayson County price dip is a supply correction layered on top of a genuine, still-unfolding demand story, not a sign that the TI thesis was wrong. McLeod's comment about builders finally pricing "more realistic" after a slow year is exactly what you'd expect to hear in a market absorbing a permitting wave that got ahead of itself. NTREIS data cited alongside his interview showed 31 more residential leases signed in Grayson County than the same point the year before, a small but real signal that people are still choosing to live there while they wait to see how home prices settle.

What This Means If You're Comparing Grayson to Collin or Denton County

If you're cross-shopping Grayson County against Collin or Denton, the honest read is this: you're buying into a market where the long-term demand case is unusually well documented, TI's own hiring targets, GlobalWafers' production ramp, the multiplier effect Sherman's mayor keeps referencing, and where the current pricing reflects a temporary imbalance rather than a lack of interest. That combination doesn't show up often. Most markets are either overpriced because everyone already knows the story, or cheap because nobody believes the story yet. Grayson County right now is cheap while the story is already confirmed.

That doesn't mean prices won't keep drifting for a while as inventory clears. It means the clearing is happening against a backdrop where thousands of jobs are still being filled over the next several years, not walked back.

A Few Questions Worth Asking Before You Write an Offer

Is the price softness the same in Sherman and Denison? No. Sherman's decline has been steeper than Denison's over the past year, which tracks with Sherman absorbing more of the direct new-construction volume tied to the TI campus itself.

Does the TI jobs number include contractors and suppliers? The widely cited figure of roughly 3,000 is TI's direct hiring target. Local officials have pointed to a multiplier of two to three additional jobs per primary position in supporting industries, which is a separate and larger number that shows up in the local economy over a longer timeline.

Should I wait for prices to fall further? That's a personal call that depends on your timeline and financing, not something a market snapshot can answer for you. What the data supports is that today's negotiating position favors buyers more than it has in recent memory, in a county with a documented, multi-billion-dollar reason to expect demand to catch up to supply eventually.

Grayson County is one of the more interesting corners of North Texas to be watching right now precisely because the headline and the data disagree. If you want help sorting out what that disagreement actually means for a specific address, whether it's in Sherman, Denison, Van Alstyne, or one of the smaller towns riding the same wave, the team at Monument Realty TX works this market and can walk you through what your budget actually buys today versus what it might buy once the current inventory clears. Contact us.