From the wildfires of California to the red tide of coastal Florida, climate plays a real role in America’s real estate market.
In the Dallas area, we mostly consider ourselves lucky. Besides having some of the hottest summers on the central plains, our climate is conducive to safe settling grounds. But with an influx of coastal transplants, it’s important to investigate how climate change impacts the Dallas-Fort Worth real estate market.
Climate Change Spurs Climate Migration
A World Bank Report on internal migration predicts 200 million people relocating due to climate change concerns in the next three decades. This is sure to create migration hotspots inland where developed cities like Dallas incur mass influxes of displaced people.
While these new residents will surely stimulate several areas of our economy, many fear impacts on housing inventory and energy resources.
System Overload
As we witnessed during the winter storm to end them all last year, Texas isn’t exactly the most energy resilient. Though we are independent in terms of energy, we’re not exactly equipped for mass overloads. This is where climate change could levy a one-two punch on our power grid and put a pause on construction.
John Nielsen-Gammon, Director of Texas Center of Climate Studies talked to us about a two-fold real estate impact, caused by both short and long-term climate effects.
“You have both slow load consequences and fast load consequences,” He explained. “The slow load or long-term positions Dallas as a haven for more climate immigrants. As northern states become less desirable in terms of climate, there becomes a problem of how to house them here.”
These coupled with short-term, fast-load consequences, like natural disasters or energy crises, could have major impacts on the future of North Texas real estate.
“In terms of house values, there are a number of ways it could go,” said Nielsen-Gammon. “There are so many factors these changes could impact. Flood plain recalculations and population density could easily impact real estate values.”
And these are just to name a few. As we all know, it’s difficult to predict the weather. It’s even more difficult to predict the real estate market. However, if we don’t identify some of our major weaknesses, we could get caught in a perfect storm.
Scouting our blind spots now is the best way to keep the North Texas real estate market thriving despite climate change concerns.
