Texas Home Lending News

Getting your home loan pre-approved in the Dallas area before beginning your home hunt is a smart move. Dallas and Fort Worth area house hunters shouldn’t expect to find many bargains during this spring’s Dallas-area home market according to Steve Brown at the Dallas Morning News.

 Median home sales prices are higher than a year ago in almost every neighborhood, with some of the biggest increases in southern Dallas County. A few northern suburbs, including Richardson and Plano, also saw home price spikes in the first quarter of 2017.

The biggest year-over-year home price increases in the first three months of the year were in DeSoto (25 percent), Lancaster (22 percent), southern Dallas (22 percent) and the Park Cities (22 percent). All but five of the 45 Dallas-area residential districts thatThe Dallas Morning News

tracks each quarter had home sales price hikes, according to data from the Real Estate Center at Texas A&M University and North Texas Real Estate Information Systems.

The area with the biggest gain in home sales was the affluent Park Cities area, where real estate agents sold 200 homes. That’s a 57 percent jump in homes purchased from first quarter 2016.

After a slowdown at the end of last year, the home market is picking up, said Sheila Rice of Virginia Cook Realtors.“In January, things started moving,” Rice said. “The seven-figure houses are selling this year more rapidly.”

In the first three months of the year, real estate agents in North Texas sold almost 400 homes priced at $1 million and up. That’s a 70 percent increase from a year earlier.

But Rice said buyer demand is highest for lower-price properties. “We are not getting enough inventory for the buyers hunting homes priced from $200,000 to $450,000,” she said. “We put a house on the market for $350,000 last week and we sold it the next day. “A house like that sells right away.”

The supply of homes on the market is lowest in neighborhoods with more moderate-price properties. There’s less than a one-month supply of home listings in Hurst, Richardson, Mesquite, Bedford, Grand Prairie, Garland, The Colony and Lancaster.

Ted Wilson, principal with Dallas housing analyst Residential Strategies, said local homebuyers are getting hit with sticker shock. Prices of preowned homes have jumped more than 40 percent in the last four years. 

“Buyers have to digest these higher prices,” Wilson said. “With these ever-increasing prices, you have to ask: How many people are we pricing out of the market? “The number of homes available for a household making $55,000 is getting tougher and tougher to find.”

 Wilson said the home affordability pinch in Dallas would have been worse if home finance costs had risen as much as predicted. “It was something everybody was wringing their hands about at the first of the year,” he said. “But the mortgage rates have backed off a little bit. “We’ve been able to digest them pretty well.”

Finding enough homes to sell is still the greatest challenge for agents, said Mary Frances Burleson, CEO of Ebby Halliday Realtors. “The supply of homes is still very short,” Burleson said. “We’re seeing fewer properties priced at less than $250,000.”

 Corporate moves to North Texas and the creation of thousands of jobs have kept demand for houses at a high level the last few years, she said. “Usually one of these cycles lasts for four or five years,” Burleson said. “But this one is still going. “I feel better about our marketplace than I have in a long time.”

Knowing how this real estate market is here in Dallas and with no sign of slowing down, let Sublime Financial get you pre-approved so when you do find a house you want, you’ll be able to act faster.

Contact us now at Sublime Financial here in Dallas and let us get you started with a pre-approval so you can get the home you want and not get left out.