Summary: Until recently, buyers competing for a limited supply of homes routinely had to pay more than the asking price and make offers on the spot. Now there are more homes for sale in Texas than at any time since fall 2020 — when the state’s pandemic housing crunch kicked off in earnest.
Latest Update: Friday, 02 September, 2022
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The Texas Tribune, 01 September, 2022
After years of sharp rises in home prices and stiff competition to buy a home amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the Texas housing market is starting to cool off.
Until recently, buyers competing for a limited supply of homes routinely had to pay more than the asking price and make offers on the spot. Now there are more homes for sale in Texas than at any time since fall 2020 — when the state’s pandemic housing crunch kicked off in earnest.
Home sales in Texas declined by more than 5% in the three months from April to June compared with the same period last year, data from the Texas Real Estate Research Center at Texas A&M University show. The Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston and San Antonio metropolitan areas saw similar drop-offs. In Austin, home sales have fallen more sharply — by 12%.
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That’s a marked shift from the height of the pandemic when historically low mortgage rates and a shift to working from home drove buyers — including Millennials who had postponed becoming homeowners — to snatch up houses so fast that the state’s supply plummeted and home prices rose an average of 28% between the start of the pandemic and the end of 2021.
San Antonio, El Paso, Houston and the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex all saw double-digit growth in home listings last month — and a corresponding dip in the number of homes sold. Each metro area saw fewer home sales in the first seven months this year compared with the same period last year.
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The median selling price of a Texas home has flattened over the past three months, hovering around $350,000 to $360,000, an all-time high for the state. Barring a recession, real estate experts don’t expect home prices to come down anytime soon because Texas is still gaining thousands of residents and its job market is still growing — but they do expect prices to grow more slowly than they did over the past two years.
“People are continuing to move here,” said Adam Perdue, a research economist at Texas A&M University’s TRERC. “So, there’s no reason to not think that all of our major metros in Texas as a whole still have that same underlying upward trend.”
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