Last year, Trulia, Zillow’s online residential real estate site aimed at home buyers, renters, sellers, and real estate professionals in the United States, polled their audience and found 43% of Americans want a bigger home. Even more revealing, 63% of millennials indicated they prefer larger living spaces.

With a desire to find the markets with the larger homes, Trulia dissected their data discovering the Great State of Texas is home to six of the top ten U.S. bigger home markets. Perhaps, everything really is bigger in Texas.

Three Categories of Size

Trulia looked at three major categories in determining the U.S. Metro areas with the largest homes: entry-level home size, trade-up home sizes, and premium or luxury home sizes. In each category, the top contenders are within the Lone Star State. Trulia’s Ralph McLaughlin confirms, “Every major market in the Lone Star State – Austin, Dallas, Houston and San Antonio – offers large homes for all buyers.”

Austin boasts the larger starter homes in the country at an average of almost 1,450 square feet. Houston and Dallas are numbers one and three, respectively, in having the biggest trade-up homes in the nation with median square footages at 1,900 to almost 2,000. Colorado Springs toppled the one-two finish for Texas by beating out Dallas in trade-up homes average size by a mere eight square feet. In the premium or luxury market, Dallas has the second largest homes in the country; again, beaten out by Colorado Springs and just 65 square feet on the average luxury home size.

The Influence of Mortgage Rates

No one is surprised that American homes have steadily grown larger over the last several decades, bigger is better, after all. However, the attention to the larger homes of late is, in part, due to lower interest rates. According to Ted Wilson, a Dallas-based housing analyst with Residential Strategies, “The very low mortgage rates allowed these households with good credit to purchase a lot more house for the money, so the trend was for bigger, more expensive homes.”

Last year in the United States, according to the National Association of Home Builders, the average new home size was its largest ever at 2,721 square feet.

Arguably, the hottest new market for home sales in the growing millennial population. With that in mind, Texas is certainly calling based on the information that a whopping sixty-three percent of that population wants to live in larger homes. With the average national mortgage rates still well below last years at this time, millennial buyers along with all other buyers are in an outstanding position to take advantage of the Texas market.

Contact us.

If size really does matter, in living space and in getting the biggest bang for your mortgage dollar, then the Lone Star State is where you should be shopping. Give us a call today to hear how recent mortgage rates in can influence your newest housing purchase in Texas, at (972) 591-3097.