D-FW New Home Starts Surged 22%

D-FW New Home Starts Surged 22%

North Texas homebuilders hit the ground running with new construction in the final months of 2019, starting almost 22% more homes than a year before.

Builders began work on almost 8,900 houses in October, November and December – the strongest fourth-quarter construction total in more than a decade, according to data from Dallas-based housing analyst Residential Strategies Inc.

“Lower mortgage rates energized the North Texas housing market in the second half of 2019,” Residential Strategies principal Ted Wilson said in a new report. “Our builder clients reported unseasonably strong sales in the fourth quarter, many sharing that October and November were some of the strongest sales months of the year.” 

The year-end construction blitz was enough to push D-FW home starts for the year to 35,884 units — up about 2% compared with 2018 to the highest level since the Great Recession. Even with recent years’ gains, single-family home building in North Texas is about 30% behind where it was in 2006 before the housing market crash.  Wilson said most of the start increases are in homes priced at the lower end of the market — from $200,000 to $300,000. Starts of houses that cost more than $500,000 were down almost 15% in the fourth quarter from the same period in 2018. “Most of the growth has come from the value-focused builders that are addressing the local housing affordability challenges,” Wilson said.

Builders sold more than 8,500 D-FW area homes in the final quarter of 2019, about 6% more than a year earlier.

Sales of preowned houses also rose significantly in the final months of 2019. Preowned home sales in North Texas jumped 15% in December from a year earlier, and home sales for all of 2019 hit a record of more than 108,000 purchases...

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