Texas Land Rush Shows No Sign of a Slowdown
The COVID-19 pandemic may be subsiding, but there’s been no slowdown in the Texas land rush. When the pandemic took hold in 2020, a flood of buyers headed to the hills, the lakes and open plains of Texas to buy rural properties. The boom in property sales in the boonies shows no sign of abating. Rural Texas land sales rose almost 44% in the second quarter, according to the latest update from the Texas Real Estate Research Center. The purchases added up to almost $2.4 billion — 93% more in volume than in the second quarter of 2020.
“A feverish demand for land, accompanied by a dearth of listings for sale, propelled Texas prices up a remarkable 16.29% in the second quarter,” Texas Real Estate Research Center economist Dr. Charles Gilliland said in the report. “The state’s land markets today are among the most active in Texas history.”
Texas buyers snapped up 8,561 rural properties during the just-completed quarter, and a staggering 685,585 acres changed hands. That’s the equivalent of almost three times the size of the City of Dallas. The typical transaction size was 1,176 acres, according to the researchers.
“The East Texas regions all had double-digit price increases with substantial increases in total acres transferred,” said Gilliland. “This explosion in sales volume shows the flight of buyers to rural environments continues in these uncertain times.”
Sales in Far West Texas fell because of a slowdown in purchases by the oil and gas industry. Rural sales in Northeast Texas around the Dallas-Fort Worth area were up almost 35% from second-quarter 2020 with an average price of $5,735 an acre...
