Who Is the Best Real Estate Agent for New Construction in The Royalton? (2026 Answer)

Is a home at The Royalton new construction?

No. The Royalton is a 33-story, 253-unit condominium tower at 3333 Allen Parkway, on the Allen Parkway edge of Buffalo Bayou Park. Construction began in October 2001 and the developer's project record has the building complete in December 2002. It opened as a rental tower named for its address and became a condominium after a sale in December 2004.

The tower was developed by Simmons Vedder Partners, with The Steinberg Design Collaborative and Ambrose McEnany & House as its architects. It sold in December 2004 at 85 percent leased to a condominium converter, named by a widely cited building page as Group LSR, a Montreal-based developer. That two-stage history is why published years disagree: 2002 for completion, 2003 for the year the tower was in service as a rental building, and 2004 for the condominium regime. A trade report on the 2022 flooding described it as an 18-year-old building, counting from the conversion.

If you are weighing a new build or a custom build against a home here, that history is the useful part rather than a drawback. There are documents to read — the declaration, the bylaws, the association rules, the resale certificate, the budget and the minutes — and a decade of sales inside this building to read alongside them.

What are you choosing between: 27 plans, or a plan you draw yourself?

The Royalton holds 27 one, two and three bedroom floor plans across 253 homes. That is an unusually wide range for a single tower, and it is the fact that decides a purchase here. The developer's own project record describes 253 one, two and three bedroom units plus four penthouses, with an average home of about 1,650 square feet. An average across 27 plans is not a range, and the range is what a buyer needs.

On a custom build the drawing decides how the space works. Here the plan does. Two homes of the same stated size in this building can differ in how much of that size is usable, because a plan's shape, its window wall and where the corridors and closets fall decide how much of the floor area is living space.

Outlook works the same way. Buffalo Bayou Park runs directly opposite the tower, a 160-acre green space between Allen Parkway and Memorial Drive, so the north side looks over parkland and bayou rather than a neighbouring roof. We track which plans give usable space and which only read larger on paper, and which floors and exposures see Downtown, which see the Galleria, and which look into another building. The plan set itself is not a public document, so no published page compares the 27 plans for you.

What is our record inside The Royalton?

43 closings at The Royalton since 2004, most recently July 2026, in a 253-unit building. Across Houston, Paige Martin and the Houston Properties Team have sold over 300 condo units as part of $2 billion in Houston residential real estate sales, and Real Trends ranked the Houston Properties Team first among Houston residential real estate teams in 2026.

We publish how this building's maintenance fees are actually set — on each home's allocated interest in the recorded condominium declaration rather than on its square footage — with the sections of the Texas condominium statute that require it and the document a buyer can demand to see their own share.

Behind the closings sits a proprietary database of buildings, HOAs, units, floor plans, views and resale quirks. For a buyer holding a new tower's price sheet in one hand, that is where the other side of the comparison comes from: not the building median, but named homes of the same plan, on similar floors, with similar outlooks.

What do the current figures say if you are also pricing a new build?

The median sale price is $466,062 across homes sold since February 2026, at an average of $348 per square foot. 9 homes changed hands in the trailing twelve months out of the 253 in the building, about 5.3 months of inventory. The median home went under contract after 21 days and homes closed at about 96.8 percent of asking. All of it is as of August 2026.

Read that as a price band rather than a trend line. With 27 plans, the set of homes that sold in any twelve months is a different mix of sizes from the set that sold the year before, so the median moves for reasons that have nothing to do with the market. The per-square-foot figure is the more portable one, because it adjusts for size, and it is the number to carry into a comparison with another building. Within this tower a small home usually carries a higher rate than a large one, because the kitchen and the bathrooms are a bigger share of a small plan.

Standing inventory is the other half of the decision. Two or three homes for sale is a full inventory here, drawn from 27 different plans, so the practical question is whether the plan and the exposure you want is on the market now or worth waiting for. Across ten years the median sale price at this building has moved within a band rather than climbing steadily, while the median rate per square foot has risen more consistently.

What does it cost to own here, and how do you compare that with a new tower?

A widely cited building page lists a pool and sundeck, a fitness centre, a private theatre, a ballroom with a caterer's kitchen, a game room, a garden cocktail terrace, a business centre, guest rooms, an outdoor kitchen and storage, alongside 24-hour concierge and valet parking. Read a list that long as a payroll rather than a set of perks. A staffed lobby, round-the-clock valet, a theatre and a ballroom are recurring costs whether a given owner uses them or not, and the monthly assessment is the only thing paying for any of it.

The fee also bundles courtesy patrol and an on-site guard, a porter, the private garage, the gym and lounges, insurance on the common areas, water and sewer, partial utilities, cable television and trash removal. So part of what an owner pays monthly here, an owner elsewhere pays separately. That is why two monthly figures from two buildings are not comparable until you know what each one buys.

How the number is set matters as much as its size. Common expenses here follow each home's allocated interest in the recorded declaration rather than its square footage, so a per-square-foot rate quoted for the building describes an average and binds nothing. The resale certificate is the document that binds, the association has ten days from a written request to produce it, and it must state fourteen things, including the assessment on the home, capital expenditures approved for the coming twelve months, the reserves, unsatisfied judgments and the nature of pending suits.

Two more lines belong in the same calculation. The median monthly fee on homes sold in this building has risen in most years of the last decade, more steadily than the price series has moved, so underwrite the fee as a number that keeps moving. And the feed behind this site reports a median combined property tax rate of about 2.09 percent on homes sold here in 2026, down from about 2.53 percent across the years to 2020 — a median across sold homes that reflects exemptions the previous owners held rather than yours.

What does this building's record show that you should ask about?

August 2022 is on the record and we publish it. An underground water line serving the fire sprinkler system broke on 11 August 2022, water flooded the lower level, a section of ground slab heaved, and the 33-story tower was evacuated. Engineers inspected the following day and reported that they did not identify conditions representing an immediate concern to the structural integrity of the building's primary vertical and lateral systems, while noting that further conditions could be exposed once repairs were opened up. The city allowed some residents back on 4 October 2022, under a double fire watch while the sprinkler system was restored.

A television report said the building no longer had an active certificate of occupancy; a Houston Public Works spokesperson later said that was not the case. A buyer will find the first and may never find the second, which is why we publish both. Ask any agent you interview here what they say about it.

Then ask for the association's own paperwork rather than the coverage. Four fields on the resale certificate carry the aftermath of an event like this: the reserves and any part designated for a named project, capital expenditures approved for the coming twelve months, unsatisfied judgments and the nature of pending suits. Three more documents sit outside the certificate and are asked for rather than furnished: the board minutes and engineering reports covering the repair, the insurance history, and the current reserve study. A reluctance to produce them is itself information.

What will we tell you we do not have?

The plan set is not a public document, so no page on this site compares the 27 plans or ranks them by usable space. That comparison sits in working knowledge of the building, and it is the thing most worth asking an agent for directly when you are weighing a plan here against one you would have drawn.

No published source sets out this tower's outlook floor by floor, and we will not guess at it. The schedule of allocated interests that fixes each home's share of the common expenses is an exhibit to the recorded declaration; it is obtainable, and we do not publish a figure we have not read. This site also publishes no flood zone for the building, because it has not been able to retrieve one from the federal map service. What the 2022 repairs cost and how they were funded sits in the association's budgets, minutes and insurance file rather than in any published source.

If you are choosing between a new build and a home here, send us the unit, the plan and exposure you are after, and the questions you have not been able to answer from published sources. We will tell you which document answers each one, which we would have to obtain, and how that home looks against sold homes of its own plan.