I’ve been hearing all sorts of statistics concerning the Waco real estate market. Unfortunately when I hear those statistics, usually the person telling me those stats can’t quote time periods or other variables that were included in the analysis. When I ask someone, “What time periods or areas or price ranges are we talking about?”. They don’t know! I guess maybe because they’re repeating what they’ve heard somewhere else. I’m a big picture kind of guy. I can’t get the big picture if I don’t know some of the details though.
I just finished reading an article from the Dallas News concerning the DFW housing market. Apparently, new home sales are down about 40% for the first 3 months of this year compared to the same time period last year in the Dallas/Ft. Worth Metroplex. That figure closely matches the Waco numbers I just looked at in our MLS for the same time period (Waco new home sales down 41%).
Note/Disclaimer: The figures that I pulled up for the Waco market could be skewed just a little. In our MLS, when I pull up houses that have sold, there’s an age range that I can choose from (New, 0-5 years, 6-10 years, 11-20 years, 20-30 years, and 31+), unfortunately, sometimes the Realtor who listed that property may have mistakenly inputed a wrong year in the MLS. I’ve seen some brand new houses that were listed with an age range of “0-5 Years”, when it should have been tagged as “New” (and homes built in the 60s that were tagged as 0-5 years). When I’m looking at new home sales, I simply choose to look at properties that are tagged with “new” as the price range, so if the data in the MLS is wrong, then my results could be skewed a little. Also, I don’t include “Manufactured Housing” (mobile homes) in my results.
Existing home sales for the DFW area (1st quarter this year compared to last year) were down 20%. Once again, closely matching Waco’s market (Waco existing home sales down 19%).
The data I used for the Waco real estate market includes all areas covered by our MLS (mainly McLennan County and a small handful of homes in outlying areas). I did not break the sales analysis down by zip code, school district, region, subdivision, etc…
Waco and DFW seem to be pretty closely matched an sales data. It appears that Texas, as a whole, is doing better than many parts of the country. Still down from our “highs”, but compared to places like Virginia, Nevada, Arizona, California, etc… We seem to be more stable.
Our home values in the Waco area (and Texas), are doing much better than those in other parts of the country.
Here’s some other key pieces of info:
- Average price per home (not including manufactured housing) for the first quarter of 2009 is only down 3.35% compared to the same time period a year ago
- The Median price is down 12.2% to $99,450
Our median price is down considerably compared to our average price which indicates that more people are buying cheaper properties.
No real surprise that the Waco housing closely matches that of of the DFW area. Texas, as whole, has some really great real estate values (and opportunities).
