My Big Fat Sales Price: Is The Dallas Real Estate Market Getting Too Hot?

If it’s under $1.5 million, it’s flying off the shelves. I have just heard about a new record sale in Devonshire: $50,000 over list, a bidding war of 3 to 5 buyers, cash, so when the appraisal won’t support the sales price, it won’t matter. But that big fat sales price WILL count for the next Devonshire transaction. Up, up, up they go.

The new Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller Home Price Index shows May Dallas home prices up 8.8%, which was more than twice the nationwide gain in April.

And get this: Dallas had the third highest home price rise in the country, THE THIRD! We were (at 8.8%) just behind Denver, 10.3 percent and San Francisco, at 10 percent.

“Home prices continue to rise across the country, but the pace is not accelerating,” says David M. Blitzer, Managing Director and Chairman of the Index Committee at S&P Dow Jones Indices. “Moreover, consumer expectations are consistent with the current pace of price increases.

What does that mean? That consumers are OK with paying through the nose? I know salaries are keeping up with home prices, and fed up renters are trying mightily to get into the housing market. It’s just tough to save for a 20% down payment when your rent keeps going up.

Dallas area home prices are now at a record high, and 15 percent above the peak of the insane housing market before the last great big recession. That’s for moderately priced homes.

$150,000 to $1.5 million: flying off the shelves

$1.6 to $3 million: strong market, strong sales, fewer buyers

$3.1 to $7 million: $7 million seems to be the magic cut off number for higher net worth folks looking for a new luxury home.

$10 million and above — soft — except for the bidding war that got 9806 Inwood Road sold for about $5 million over asking.

At NAREE in Miami, we were told that higher interest rates will definitely cool the jets come fall. Do you think it will?