Dallas City Wire

Prices of homes continue to steadily rise in the Dallas area, with prices 2.6 percent higher than last year. 

The S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller Home Rice Index was recently released and showed that the 2.6 percent in Dallas, was less than the national annual price rise of 3.8 percent in December. House prices grew in each of the major U.S. home markets, the survey said, but none grew into the double digit percentages. 

"The U.S. housing market continued its trend of stable growth in December,” Craig Lazzara of S&P said in the survey. “At the national level, home prices are 59 percent above the trough reached in February 2012, and 15 percent above their pre-financial crisis peak.”

Phoenix, Arizona (6.5 percent), Charlotte, North Carolina (5.3 percent), and Tampa, Florida (5.2 percent), saw the largest increases in home values. 

Case-Shiller's report said that homes in the Dallas area are 70 percent higher than they were during the Great Recession. This year's home price increase is what Case-Shiller expected to see in Dallas, with the median prices of home sales in North Texas being 3 percent higher than they were in 2018. 

Lower mortgage rates across the nation have caused more people to buy homes, which results in prices of homes increasing. 

Matthew Speakman, a Zillow economist, said for-sale inventory is close to the lowest it has ever been.

“The rebound in home price growth is also rooted in the sustained strength of the U.S. economy, which continues to ride a robust labor market, and mortgage rates that finished the year near their lowest levels since 2016 and have fallen even further since," Speakman said in a statement. “But while the increased competition should bring greater return for sellers in the short term, the shortage of homes on the market also presents a significant challenge to the industry going forward.”

Last year, 108,000 single-family homes were sold in North Texas by real estate agents, which broke the record for the amount of homes sold in a year in that area. 

“The drop in mortgage rates during the past week has improved payment affordability and will bring prospective buyers into the market,”  Frank Nothaft, chief economist for CoreLogic, said. “If rates stay low into the spring, we expect sales volume to be the highest in 13 years, and annual home-price growth to quicken.”