Before the housing market heated up, my guess is that few people called up Zillow and checked their home’s value. Unless they were selling or buying, why would we? As our parents said: “A watched pot never boils.”
But the housing market is boiling. And a lot of us are watching the pot.
So, it was reassuring to see that the home price index for the Dallas-Plano-Irving area jumped a region-high 24.56 percent last quarter. It can be mixed news, of course. If the value is indeed that high, home sellers will nod and grin — hoping the appraisal district doesn’t catch on — while the homebuyers will furrow their brows.
“We used to describe high growth as anywhere from 5 percent to 10 percent,” Joshua Roberson, lead data analyst for the Texas Real Estate Research Center at Texas A&M University, told the Dallas Business Journal.
The home price index has been calculated by the Texas Real Estate Research Center since the first quarter of 2005. It’s a price index based on a value of 100. The index measures price appreciation changes for residential single-family homes. It’s fully explained in this video.
The research center tracks quarterly indexes for Texas’ largest metropolitan statistical area markets of Austin-Round Rock, Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, Houston-The Woodlands-Sugar Land, San Antonio-New Braunfels, as well as Amarillo and El Paso. The center breaks the Dallas-Fort Worth area into three angles:
- The Dallas-Plano-Irving area has an aggregate index of 217.4, which was up from the Q4 2020 index of 174.53.
- The Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington aggregate index was 216.51, up from the Q4 2020 index of 175.24 for a 23.55 percent gain.
- The Fort Worth-Arlington aggregate index was 215.37, up from the Q4 2020 index of 176.64 for a 21.92 percent increase.
Trust me, the home price index reports are interesting. It’s a rabbit hole 🐇 for sure.
