North Texas real estate agents sold a record number of houses in 2014.
And a jump in fourth-quarter home starts made 2014 the best year for home construction in the Dallas-Fort Worth area since the recession.
A year-end surge in home purchases and construction was prompted by lower mortgage rates and economic expansion in Dallas-Fort Worth, housing analysts say.
More than 90,000 preowned single-family homes changed hands last year in North Texas. It's only a 1% increase in total sales from 2013.
But that was enough to make it an all-time high for home sales in the area, according to the latest data from the Real Estate Center at Texas A&M University and North Texas Real Estate Information Systems.
North Texas home sales in 2014 were about 5% higher than in 2006, before the recession. And sales have grown more than 40% since the bottom of the housing slump in 2010, when only 83,832 houses sold.
Home purchases in December through the Realtors' multiple listing service were particularly robust — 12% higher than a year earlier.
Local sales prices were 11% ahead of December 2013, with a median of $193,940.
At the end of the year, median home sales prices in North Texas were almost 40% above where they were in early 2010, when the recession reduced residential values.
Housing analysts and real estate agents say that recent declines in home finance costs helped boost sales in the final months of 2014.
"The mortgage rates have really come down again, below 4% generally available," said Dr. James Gaines, an economist with the Real Estate Center. "Buyers for existing homes are jumping on board, especially if they think rates will start going back up in the coming months."
Longtime Dallas agent Barry Hoffer of Ebby Halliday Realtors agrees that falling mortgage costs have caught buyers' attention.
"With the recent announcement from the Federal Reserve that rates may be going back up, buyers who had been considering a home have been taking action," Hoffer said. "They hate to pay more interest if they don't have to."
Hoffer said sales would be even higher if there were more houses on the market.
In December, only 16,518 houses were listed for sale with real estate agents in the more than two dozen North Texas counties that the Real Estate Center tracks for its monthly report. That's the smallest number in more than a decade — 14% fewer than in December 2013.
The booming North Texas economy, with some of the highest job and population growth numbers in the country, can take the credit for most of the housing market gains, industry members say.
"The relocation market is huge right now," said Jim Fite, CEO of Century 21 Judge Fite Co. "Job growth and pent-up demand are still the driving force of the market conditions that we are enjoying right now."
Many buyers moving into the D-FW area are choosing new houses.
Builders started 30% more houses in the final three months of last year compared with fourth quarter 2013, according to a new report by Residential Strategies Inc. For all of 2014, 25,902 homes were started in North Texas. That's about a 91% increase in home construction since 2011.
"On an annual basis, the starts were up 24%," said Residential Strategies' Ted Wilson. The builders had a really good fourth quarter."
New home sales were 11% higher in the final months of last year. In 2014, North Texas homebuilders sold 21,792 homes, an increase of about 12% over 2013 levels.
"Everybody is clucking about how strong their traffic and sales have been," Wilson said. "What has helped out quite a bit is that 30-year mortgage rates have edged down."
The number of new houses on the market for D-FW consumers to choose from remains very low. At the end of the year, there were only 3,376 finished vacant houses in North Texas, according to Residential Strategies. That's about a two-month supply.
Wilson is forecasting another strong year for North Texas new home sales and construction in 2015.
He said most builders aren't concerned about recent drops in oil prices, which have fueled fears of an economic slowdown in Texas.
"There is not any near-term expectation of any swoon in the business," Wilson said. "People in the housing industry are saying they still have all these jobs coming from Toyota and other companies."
Even with the rebound in homebuilding the last few years, home starts in North Texas remain almost 50% behind where they were in 2006, before the recession hit. Builders started more than 48,000 houses here at the peak of the market.
©2015 The Dallas Morning News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency
