North Texas Home Buys Set Record for 2020
Soaring sales in the final months of the year led to a record number of North Texas homes purchased in 2020. Real estate agents sold 119,121 single-family homes last year — a 10% rise from the previous record set in 2019. In December alone, 10,690 homes sales were handled by North Texas agents, the largest total ever for the last month of the year, according to data from the Texas Real Estate Research Center and North Texas Real Estate Information Systems.
Record low mortgage rates and a surge of buyers looking for larger homes during the COVID-19 pandemic pushed 2020 home sales to the unheard of level.
Along with the larger number of sales, prices also jumped. Local median sales prices in December were at a record $295,000 — up 9% year-over-year. Last year’s increase in home prices in North Texas mostly offset the lower financial costs.“The price appreciation nearly negates the low mortgage rates,” said Paige Shipp of CDCG Asset Management. “All that being said, buyers should take advantage of low mortgage rates. But as prices climb, the benefit of low rates wanes.”
A bigger obstacle to area homebuyers is the lack of properties available. In December, only 9,039 single-family homes were listed for sale with real estate agents in the more than two dozen North Texas counties included in the survey. That’s the lowest home inventory in more than 30 years.
“December is always the low point of the year for listings, but that is exceptionally tight,” said Ted Wilson, principal with Dallas-based housing analyst Residential Strategies. Wilson said the shortage of preowned homes on the market “will continue to push demand to the new home side of the equation.” At the end of December, there was less than a one-month supply of North Texas homes listed for sale, which is an all-time low...
