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(AP)

Worried about the fiscal cliff — that looming $500 billion combination of federal spending cuts and tax increases?

Don’t get too worked up.

For the Houston housing market, there are fewer reasons to be concerned, according to a report from RealtyPin.com, a real estate listing service.

The group asked economists from the Texas A&M Real Estate Center to weigh in on why this area may not feel a deep impact.

Here were their reasons:

1. Smart building

Houston certainly is not immune to the effects of a recession, but it wasn’t hit as hard the last time the economy crashed. Why? Unlike other metropolitan areas around the country, Houston never experienced an overbuilding period. In those other big cities, builders continued to build homes, even though the demand for them decreased. The housing market in those cities became saturated with properties that nobody wanted to buy, and when the economy crashed, there were even fewer prospective buyers shopping the market. In Houston, it was more of a controlled growth, so the available home inventory was never astronomically-high, like it was in other places. Since Houston has a lower inventory of available homes, there will be more competition among prospective buyers to purchase homes, meaning sales prices will increase.

2. More jobs

Areas with industry-specific jobs seem to handle a recession better than towns and cities that do not. If the economy falls into another recession, Houston’s housing market will still be strong because there are jobs available here. Remember, wherever there are jobs, there are home sales. Houston and the surrounding suburbs are home to many companies in the energy industry, which is pretty recession-proof. After all, regardless of how bad the economy gets, people around the country still need electricity and fuel sources. They still need heating and air conditioning in their homes, and they still need gas in their cars. If anything, a recession triggers more work in the energy industry, as researchers try to find more environmentally-friendly and cost-effective ways to provide their services.

3. Fewer foreclosures

We’ve already established that Houston has fewer homes available for sale and more jobs than similar-sized cities. For these two reasons alone, there are fewer foreclosures here as well. With fewer homes available, there is less of chance that someone who can’t afford a home will have the opportunity to purchase one. That means a borrower defaulting on a loan is less likely to occur in Houston than in other places. Also, with steady income from a good-paying, reliable job, it’s a lot less likely that homeowners will get behind on their mortgage payments. And, since builders aren’t overbuilding in Houston, it’s also less likely that a new home won’t sell, which prevents the builder from having to eat the cost of construction. All of these reasons mean fewer foreclosures, and research from the Foreclosure Information and Listing Service supports that assumption. They report that foreclosures are down in Montgomery and Fort Bend counties, and that Harris County (where Houston itself is located) is seeing the lowest number of foreclosures since the last recession began in 2008.