Four North Texas Cities Crack Top 100 in WalletHub’s First-Time Homebuyer Study

For Frisco, the residential real estate news is always rosy. It’s always atop the rankings in some study about livability. This week, a new study determined the Collin County city is an attractive option for first-time homebuyers.

Frisco ranked 22nd, highest in Texas, and an improvement over its 24th spot in 2020.

First-time homebuyers make up 40 percent of all U.S. single-family home purchases, according to WalletHub. This growth is partly because interest rates dropped dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic, the study found.

To determine its rankings, WalletHub analyzed 22 indicators of market attractiveness, affordability, and quality of life from 300 U.S. cities of varying sizes.

McKinney (74th), Allen (80th), and Denton (93rd) cracked the top 100. Of Texas cities, Dallas ranked 238th, better than 41 California cities, which didn’t do so well and reinforced the reason Californians are headed east to Texas.

Houston ranked 233rd. And if anyone is declaring any kind of rivalry with Austin, it ranked 140th. Chesapeake, Va., ranked first.

Going by city size, Fort Worth ranked 23rd among large cities, Frisco was 11th among mid-size cities, and Allen was 34th among small cities.

Frisco was tops in the study’s real-estate market metrics, which included factors such as rent-to-price ratio, median days on the market, median home-price appreciation, foreclosure rate, building-permit activity, and homeownership rate for millennials.

Plano ranked 22nd in the quality-of-life metric. Plano ranked 103rd overall.

Other North Texas cities that made the rankings: Fort Worth (125th), Grand Prairie (129th), Richardson (165th), Mesquite (167th), Carrollton (171st), Arlington (181st), Irving (191st).