Dallas Ranks Near Top of List of America’s Boom Towns

How big of a boom is Dallas experiencing? What North Texas town had more housing voucher denials than the other metros tested in a recent study? How does Dallas compare to the rest of the country when it comes to rental increases? How does Texas rank among big states when it comes to information you can get about your Realtor?

We’ll check all of that out in this week’s look at real estate news.

DALLAS IN TOP 15 LIST OF AMERICA’S BOOM TOWNS

Dallas, San Antonio, Houston, and Austin were named to a list of America’s biggest “boomtowns” compiled by personal finance site MagnifyMoney, which analyzed how the 100 largest metro areas in the country changed between 2011 and 2016 in three categories: Population and housing, workforce and earnings, and business growth.

A score of 100 was possible in each category, the site said, and the three were averaged for a final score and ranking. Factored into whether a city was experiencing a boom were things like median earnings for workers, number of businesses and number employees per pay period, unemployment rates, and housing units available.

Dallas, with an overall ranking of 7, had a population and housing score of 61.4; a workforce and earnings score of 48.7; and a business growth score of 64.4. Austin came in first in the listing of cities experiencing a boom, with scores of 100, 70.3, and 93, respectively. San Antonio came in at 9, and Houston came in at 11.

FORT WORTH TOPS LIST OF HOUSING VOUCHER DENIALS

Of five areas the Urban Institute studied in its Pilot Study of Landlord Acceptance of Housing Choice Vouchers, Fort Worth had one of the highest denial rates among the areas studied, which included Los Angeles; Newark, New Jersey; Philadelphia; and Washington, D.C.

The institute said denial rates were at the highest in areas where discrimination based on a potential tenant’s source of income (like a voucher) is not prohibited.

The study tested voucher acceptance in those five cities over a 16 month period. Researchers screened 341,00 online ads to narrow down the list to only rental housing that would be affordable to voucher holders (about 8,700 ads total).

“In telephone inquiries to the landlords about voucher acceptance in housing that would be affordable to voucher holders, the outright denial rate of vouchers was 78% in Fort Worth, 76% in Los Angeles, 67% in Philadelphia, 31% in Newark, and 15% in DC,” the researchers said. Denial rates in low-poverty neighborhoods were higher than those in high-poverty neighborhoods in Fort Worth, with an 85 percent denial rate in low-poverty neighborhoods, and a 67 percent denial rate in high-poverty areas.

“In an additional step in the study, paired testers called landlords who accept vouchers to ask about available rental housing and to schedule an appointment to view it,” the researchers explained. “Two testers would call the same landlord. These testers were similar in all aspects, including race, except that one identified as a voucher-holder and one did not.”

DALLAS SINGLE-FAMILY RENTALS POST MODEST RENTAL INCREASES

Dallas is firmly in the lower middle of the pack when it comes to how much single-family rents have increased year-over-year, CoreLogic’s first half of the year review of its single-family rental index found.

“Single-family rentals make up one-half of all residential rentals but are an overlooked segment of the housing market,” CoreLogic chief economist Molly Boesel said.  Since January 2018, the national Single-Family Rent Index (SFRI) increased 4.1 percent, and the average year-over-year increase is around 2.8 percent.

Dallas-Plano-Irving increased about 1.8 percent since January 2018. Year-over-year, rents increased at a rate of 2.2 percent.

CoreLogic predicts that the same thing that drives home prices up — availability — will also continue to drive up single-family rents up.

“High demand and low supply of lower priced single-family rental properties continue to push up rents for this segment of the rental market,” Boesel said. “With these market forces expected to stay in place in the near term, rents on lower-priced rental properties should continue to outpace those of higher-end rental properties.”

TEXAS EARNS PRAISE FOR TRANSPARENCY IN REAL ESTATE PROFESSION

Texas has one of the best systems in the country for allowing consumers to review Realtor complaints and their outcomes, New York-based real estate publication The Real Deal said.

“New York State has a remarkably unwieldy system for recording disciplinary actions against real estate brokers, with low usability and confusing organization. But how much better are other states doing? The answer, it turns out, is a lot.,” reporter Kevin Sun said.

Sun said he reviewed six different major markets to see how they addressed the issue, looking at their public disclosure systems, and ranking them by functionality and ease of use.

The Texas Real Estate Commission’s site won high praise — in fact, it was the best on the list.

“Texas was only state examined which provided a flexible search engine for consumers, allowing users to construct custom queries using various criteria,” Sun wrote. “With records of about 1,000 disciplinary actions taken against brokers and sales agents from 2007 to the present (and more actions against home inspectors and instructors as well), TREC’s disciplinary action search allows users to search for violations in a specific city, date range, or violation type, as well as searching for individual brokers and cases.”

“For many cases, the relevant documents may also be viewed directly in the search results, though others require freedom of information requests,” he added.

New York was ranked last.