The rise in mortgage rates over the past year has only slightly curbed spring selling activity and home prices in Dallas-Fort Worth.
D-FW single-family home sales in April were down 8% from a year before with 7,429 transactions, according to the latest sales report from the Texas Real Estate Research Center at Texas A&M University and North Texas Real Estate Information Systems. The report includes both new and existing home sales listed with Realtor associations, so it doesn’t include sales of new homes directly through homebuilders.
The decline in sales comes as mortgage rates have soared from about 4.7% to 5.1% in April 2022 to 6.3% to 6.4% this April, according to Freddie Mac estimates. That means buyers may face monthly payments $200 or more higher than they would have a year ago, according to mortgage calculator estimates.
Homes sold after an average 52 days on the market. A year ago, the average was just 20 days.
Despite recent upheaval in the banking system, the Federal Reserve in May continued its series of interest rate hikes that have caused mortgage rates to soar.
The median home price sunk 5% from April 2022 to $404,450, but it is still up dramatically from before the pandemic – by more than $120,000. In March 2020, the median price was $282,950.
Active listings were up 86% to 15,305, a decline from the 134% year-over-year increase seen in March. The metro area had 2.1 months of inventory in April, still far below the six months that a market balanced between buyers and sellers would have. That fuels a still-competitive seller’s market.
Home sales increased in the Dallas-Plano-Irving metro division but decreased in Fort Worth-Arlington. On the county level, Collin County home prices remained the highest but saw the biggest decline of the major North Texas counties. Sales declined the most in Dallas County.
Agents are still seeing strong demand on the ground, just not to the degree when mortgage rates were at record lows. Patty Sheets, a real estate agent in Flower Mound with Coldwell Banker, said correctly priced, well-presented homes in good locations will still get multiple offers from buyers, not the 20 or 30 offers many homes pulled in when mortgage rates were low and the market was red-hot.
“It‘s not quite as crazy as it was before,” Sheets said. “But certainly now with the low inventory, it’s still robust.”
In the first quarter, Austin-area and D-FW-area homes were the most expensive in the state, while homes in the Wichita Falls and Texarkana areas were the least expensive, according to a separate report from Texas Realtors.
Dallas-Fort Worth has not seen as drastic of a price correction as in Austin and other metros nationwide where prices skyrocketed during the pandemic.
