Ennis Landed a Billion-Dollar Factory. Its Home Prices Fell Anyway.

If you've been watching Ennis from a distance, comparing it against Midlothian, Waxahachie or Red Oak on a portal's price chart, the number you're staring at probably doesn't match the story you've heard about the town. The story is a growing manufacturing base pulling in hundreds of new jobs. The number is a median home value that actually dipped over the past year. Both are true at the same time, and the gap between them is the most useful thing a buyer or seller can understand about Ennis right now.

As of June 30, 2026, the average home value in Ennis sat at $267,243, down slightly from a year earlier, with the median sale price hovering near $268,000, off by less than one percent year over year. A separate read on the market from earlier this spring found that roughly a third of active Ennis listings had already taken at least one price cut, with inventory running at 5.2 months of supply, just above the 5-month mark that separates a balanced market from a buyer's market. That is not what you'd expect from a town in the middle of the largest industrial buildout in its history.

What Actually Got Built

New Jersey-based Freshpet announced its Ennis plant in February 2020 as a $264 million project expected to create 427 jobs. By the time the company held its ribbon cutting in the fall of 2022, the scope had grown well beyond the original plan. Ennis's own Economic Development Corporation now describes the completed buildout as exceeding $900 million in capital investment, generating more than 600 jobs, making it the largest single project the city has ever landed. The plant reuses an estimated 74 million gallons of water a year and generates 10 megawatts of its own power on site, details that tell you this isn't a modest expansion of an existing line. It's a new industrial anchor built from the ground up.

Then, in June 2024, IKO Metals broke ground on a second facility a short drive away, a $40 million investment that grew to roughly $60 million by the time the plant celebrated its grand opening in July 2025. The 205,000-square-foot building sits on 42 acres and produces stone-coated metal roofing under the Decra and Tilcor brands. It started with 50 local jobs and has room to grow toward 90.

Put those two projects together and you have close to a billion dollars of new industrial investment landing in a city of under 27,000 people over the past six years. Population followed. Ennis grew from 20,219 residents at the 2020 census to an estimated 26,829 in 2026, a jump of nearly 33 percent. The city's own economic development corporation puts it plainly: housing growth in Ennis has accelerated from roughly 1 percent a year historically to more than 5 percent annually now.

The Number That Doesn't Match the Story

Here's where the math should have worked differently. A city adding jobs and residents at that pace usually sees home values climb, not soften. Instead, Ennis is showing the same signals as a buyer's market: months of supply above the balanced threshold, price cuts on a meaningful share of active listings, and homes sitting longer before going under contract.

Some of that softness isn't unique to Ennis. Texas as a whole has been in a stretch of falling prices, with the state's home price index declining for 13 straight months through June 2026, according to the Texas Real Estate Research Center at Texas A&M. Statewide months of supply stood at 5.4 as of that same June 2026 report, and the typical seller price cut across Texas was $12,000, or about 3.3 percent of the original list price. Ennis's spring reading of 5.2 months of supply lands close to that statewide picture, even a touch tighter, which tells you the town isn't an outlier so much as it's riding the same current as the rest of the state, just with a local wrinkle layered on top.

The wrinkle is supply. While Freshpet and IKO Metals were adding payroll, homebuilders were adding lots, and they didn't wait for the jobs to show up in a paycheck first.

Builders Read the Job Numbers Before Buyers Did

Walk through the new-construction listings in Ennis right now and you'll find D.R. Horton building out Stonewyck Farms, with new Express Series homes going up on streets like Barton Drive and Fairbanks Drive. Riverside Homebuilders has The Hollow underway inside city limits, pitched at first-time buyers and move-up families alike. Other active communities include Bluebonnet Estates Phase 2, Christian Meadows, and the Prairie View Cottage and Watermill sections, spanning builders and price points from the low $200,000s past $900,000.

That's a lot of new inventory arriving at once, and it arrived on a builder's timeline rather than a hiring timeline. National builders plan subdivisions years in advance based on projected population growth, not on the exact month a plant reaches full staffing. When a city like Ennis posts double-digit population gains and gets tagged as a growth market, the response from builders tends to be immediate and collective. Several builders open communities in the same window, supply gets ahead of the households actually moving in to fill those new jobs, and the market temporarily tilts toward whoever's buying rather than whoever's selling.

That's the mechanism behind the number. Ennis isn't softening because the economic story is false. It's softening because the housing supply story and the jobs story are running on different clocks, and right now supply is a step ahead.

What This Means If You're Buying Right Now

If you're cross-shopping Ennis against Midlothian or Waxahachie on affordability alone, the current gap between job growth and home prices is worth treating as a window rather than a permanent condition. A market with 5-plus percent annual population growth and two major employers still ramping toward full staffing doesn't typically stay soft for long. Buyers acting in this window get real negotiating room: price cuts on close to a third of active listings, builder incentives on new construction that's competing hard for buyers, and less pressure to waive contingencies than in a tighter market.

One thing worth checking before you write an offer: property tax rates in Ellis County vary meaningfully by subdivision because of overlapping school district levies and municipal utility district assessments. Two homes a few blocks apart in Ennis can carry different effective rates depending on which MUD covers the lot. The Ellis Central Appraisal District publishes the taxing entities attached to a specific address, worth checking before you commit to a number.

What This Means If You're Selling Right Now

If you already own in Ennis and you're weighing whether to list, that price-cut share from earlier this spring is the piece to sit with. Close to a third of active listings had already been reduced at least once, which usually means the initial asking price was set against last year's comps rather than this year's supply. In a market where builders are actively discounting and incentivizing new construction to move it, a resale home priced even slightly ambitious sits, and every week it sits adds to the buyer's leverage in negotiation.

The homes selling fastest right now aren't necessarily the newest or the largest. They're the ones priced against the current month's competition, not the market from a year ago when the Freshpet expansion was still fresh news. A pricing strategy built on this month's active inventory, not last year's closed sales, is the difference between a home that sells at asking and one that becomes the fourth price cut on the block.

A Few Straight Answers

Will Ennis prices bounce back once these plants reach full staffing? There's no way to promise a timeline, but the underlying logic points that direction. Supply gluts caused by builders front-running population growth tend to resolve as the population catches up, and Ennis's population growth has been running well ahead of its historical pace.

Is this dip specific to Ennis, or is it happening across Ellis County? Both. Texas as a whole has seen 13 consecutive months of price softening through mid-2026, so some of what you're seeing in Ennis reflects the broader state trend. The added supply from new subdivisions is the piece that's more specific to Ennis and nearby growth corridors.

Does the new industrial base change what kind of buyer Ennis attracts? It's already showing up in migration patterns. Search-behavior data collected between May and July of 2025 found that most people looking at Ennis homes already lived inside the Dallas-Fort Worth metro, so the shift so far looks more like local relocation toward new jobs than a wave of out-of-state buyers.

If you're trying to figure out whether Ennis fits your timeline, or how a specific address stacks up against what builders are pricing right now, Tiffany West can walk through the current comps with you street by street. Start with an instant home valuation to see where your own numbers land before you decide what to do next.