From staff reports
The good news is, North Texas isn’t dead last. The bad news is, North Texas barely cracked the top 50 best places for Realtors to live. But even that bad news is actually fairly good news, when you consider that WalletHub’s rankings were based on 170 cities.
Of North Texas cities, Fort Worth fared the best, coming in 43rd (Austin was the highest ranked Texas city, at 42). Dallas, Garland, Plano, Grand Prairie, Irving, and Arlington ranked 52, 72, 74, 82, 97, and 104, respectively.
In fact, statewide North Texas cumulatively fared much better than other pockets of Texas.
Nationally, January to February showed the biggest month-to-month rise in home sales since 2015.
In North Texas, things are still robust, but a market shift toward buyer-friendly has begun to creep in. According to Trulia, nearly 79 percent of all zip codes in Dallas have shifted in favor of buyers as of January.”
Home sales fell 3 percent in the first quarter of 2019, year over year, and the number of houses on the market has increased by 24 percent. Almost 20 percent of homes on the market have had at least one price cut, and it takes about 14 percent longer to sell a house.
Texas housing sales increased 5.2 percent month-over-month in February, and the typical Texas home continued to average two months on market and sold above 95 percent of the original list price, the Texas A&M Real Estate Center said. Fort Worth posted the largest monthly sales growth at 12. 4 percent, and Dallas and Houston posted growth of 6 and 6.5 percent, respectively.
“In the coming year, real-estate agents may want to relocate to places with the highest demand for housing, and that pay the best for their expert guidance,” WalletHub said.
The company arrived at its rankings after it compared more than 170 U.S. cities across 19 key indicators of a healthy housing market, ranging from sales per agent to annual median wage for real-estate agents to housing-market health index.
Other Texas metros in the rankings included Houston (136), San Antonio (137), Amarillo (153), Laredo (160), Lubbock (161), Corpus Christi (175), El Paso (177), and Brownsville (179).