November was a pretty good month for North Texas real estate. According to the Dallas Morning News, both home prices and the number of sales in the North Texas region were up in November. This is continuing a trend of higher prices and more sales North Texas has seen throughout 2015.
According to the Real Estate Center at Texas A&M University, sales prices for preowned homes sold by real estate agents in North Texas are 11 percent higher than where they were in November 2014, and it’s been that way for the first 11 months of 2015. If the current trend holds, says Dallas Morning News, “median home sales prices in the area will show one of the biggest annual increases in decades.”
The downside to this continued trend is the affordability factor. Although it’s great that North Texas real estate is hot right now, the rapid price increases are pushing out many would-be buyers.
“It’s becoming problematic and affordability is a big issue,” said Ted Wilson of Dallas housing analyst Residential Strategies, Inc. “Sales will eventually slow down if you continue to escalate prices at that rate. I don’t see any signs of a slowdown in pricing over the near term.”
According to the Dallas Morning News, at the end of November, the median sales price of single-family homes sold by North Texas Realtors was $204,000. That’s 9 percent higher than November 2014’s figure.
Despite the higher costs however, November 2015’s home sales did not suffer. Real estate agents sold 6.504 houses and 446 condominiums in November 2015, according to data from the Real Estate Center and North Texas Real Estate Information Systems. That represents an 8 percent year-over-year increase.
Here are a few other key facts that define the current state of the North Texas real estate market:
- For the second month in a row, the number of houses on the market in North Texas was 1 percent higher than in 2014, so inventory is growing, albeit slowly.
- On average, it took 45 days to sell homes that closed in November, 20 percent less time than in November 2014.
- Pending home sales in North Texas remain high, with more than 7,300 houses under contract, 33 percent more than a year earlier.
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