Dallas Fort Worth

Dallas Fort Worth Real Estate Staring At Potential Bear Market

The Dallas-Fort Worth real estate market is looking at a bear of a problem. After the worst Christmas-Eve trading session in history for U.S. stock markets, time is running out for the wise guys on Wall Street to save indices from entering bear market territory. Looking at home prices and sales volumes in the DFW area, it would seem things are still running along fairly normally; however, it could be a mistake to assume the recent softness in home sales is just a blip in an otherwise stabilizing market. We could easily see a rally into [...]

Denton County Home Prices Drop As DFW Sees Worst Sales In 7 Years

Denton County home prices slid 2 percent in November as the DFW housing market experienced the worst sales decline in 7 years. The good news is that the sales volume estimates in the official press releases are now more reflective of reality. The bad news is that actual home sales in Dallas-Fort Worth are still rather soft. Home sales in Denton County dropped 9 percent in November, in line with the 8 percent decline seen for DFW. Pending home sales in Denton County slid 3 percent compared to the same time a year ago, slightly [...]

High Prices, Higher Rates Stall Dallas Fort Worth New Home Market

High prices and higher rates are hammering the Dallas-Fort Worth new home market. Starts from new home builders are now expected to increase by only a few hundred homes next year. I am not surprised. I covered this development a few days ago in my post on DR Horton's fourth quarter results, but a recent piece in the Dallas Morning News citing an industry insider/expert highlights the failure of local media to report on what is actually happening. My October housing market report for the DFW area explains why the correction in the local real estate [...]

Denton County Home Sales Continue Sliding In October

Denton County Texas home sales continued to slide in October as the real estate market softened throughout the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Closed sales in Denton County fell roughly 8 percent for the month of October compared to last year. This is slightly worse than the 6% sales decline for the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area. Pending single-family home sales in the Denton County area were down about 14 percent for the month of October as the stock market swoon also hit the local housing sector. The official statistical estimate of a 9 percent pending sales decline [...]

DR Horton Posts Higher Sales And Orders On Lower Average Prices

Dallas-Fort Worth-based DR Horton released fourth quarter numbers showing an 11 percent increase in home closings for the latest three months ending September 30. The company also posted a 11 percent jump in new net sales orders for the fiscal fourth quarter. With 51,857 homes sold during the past year, DR Horton still edges out Lennar as the country's largest home builder by volume. While DR Horton posted solid results on new home sales and profitability in the latest quarter, the housing slowdown is still evident digging into the company's latest numbers. In the midst [...]

High End Dallas-Fort Worth Real Estate Could Get Crushed

As I detailed yesterday, the Dallas-Fort Worth real estate market fell out of bed last month. With pending home sales registered to post some of the worst numbers in years and inventory marching higher across the Dallas Fort Worth area, it is painfully clear that that the real economy in the DFW area is more fragile than the sell-side pundits would have us believe. I'm not surprised, because I cover the hype and spin in the real estate sector regularly on this blog. In a recent interview with Bloomberg, 'Black Swan' author Nassim Taleb specifically [...]

Existing Home Sales Soften As New Home Permits Stall

Today the National Association of Realtors reported that existing home sales for August came in flat from last month, actually down about 1.5% from this time last year. The median price of an existing home sold in the U.S. during the month of August posted at $264,800, a rise of 4.6 percent year-over-year and the 78th consecutive month of year-over-year price gains. According to NAR chief economist, Lawrence Yun, "homes continue to fly off the shelves" with most properties selling within a month. The supply of existing homes in the United States rose to 4.3 [...]

10 Years After The Housing Crash, Dallas-Fort Worth Experiencing Consequences Of Policy Failures

10 years after the housing crash and the Great Recession that nearly brought the world economy to its knees, the adults in the room are still pretending that everything is normal. If you read the Dallas Morning News and the spin of many professional economists, the DFW real estate market has emerged from the wreckage 10 years ago relatively unscathed. With DFW home prices at record highs, most housing pundits are eager to suggest everything is awesome. Apparently the recent rise in home inventories is just blip in an otherwise normalization of the formerly red [...]

New Home Builders Clipped By Weak Order Growth

New home builders had a relatively rough week with several major publicly-traded builders experiencing some nasty haircuts in their stock prices. With the exception of DR Horton, it wasn't a good week for home builder stocks. While Facebook and Twitter were seeing record drops in their share prices, new home builders were also experiencing a hangover from weak growth in new home orders. The Dow Jones Home Construction Index has trended lower for most of the year, down almost 18 percent year-to-date. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand why the index peaked just [...]

DFW Adds 10,000 Jobs In June, CPI Still Running Hot

The DFW area tacked on another 10,000 jobs during the month of June according to numbers released by the Texas Workforce Commission. That was more than a third of the 27,200 positions gained in Texas during the month. The unemployment rate for the Dallas-Fort Worth- Arlington MSA posted a 3.8 percent, just slightly below the 3.9 percent figure at this time last year. Midland Texas still held the lowest unemployment rate in Texas at only 2.4 percent. While the Dallas area still posted solid job gains during the month of June, the unadjusted numbers show [...]

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