Once again, Frisco makes national Real Estate news, not for being the very best community to live, or the fastest-growing community in the U.S., but for being oversupplied with brand new homes as the real estate market shifts from a seller’s paradise to a buyer’s market, and as new home sales dip nationwide by almost 9 percent:
The shift may be most pronounced in what were once the most sizzling markets. Consider Frisco, Texas, a city 30 miles north of Dallas, where narrowly spaced villas of stone and brick have replaced cow pastures. Its population nearly doubled over the past decade, to 177,000. Its 8 percent jump last year made it the fastest-growing city in America.
Prashant Gopal is an excellent journalist and a friend of our’s from NAREE. He writes in Bloomberg of how falling sales and diving housing stocks are also affecting real estate agents in Frisco, who seem to be taking the biggest hits from each other as they shrink commissions in the “builder battleground”:
On a recent weekday, Konara, the real estate broker, drives his Dodge minivan along Highway 380, a builder battleground, where national giants such as Lennar, Toll Brothers, and PulteGroup go head to head with Texas companies. He stops at sales offices, where balloons festoon posts in a vain effort to spur sales. He points to empty houses that he says were completed six months ago.
His own sales are half what they were in 2016. In many cases, he’s rebating to customers all but $1,000 of his commission on each home sale. He walks into an Indian restaurant for lunch and looks up at the television screen. A competitor, the “Maximum Cash Back Realtor,” says he’ll take only $750. “You know what that means,” Konara says. “I’ll have to do the same.”
Prashant drew attention to the fact that Frisco is also home to the glittering Legacy West, transplant nirvana with Toyota headquarters (which may have subsidized some homes for employees) as well as Dallas Cowboys headquarters, where any day you can see real estate agents dining alongside football players and the Jones family. I believe the agents he is talking to, like Konara, but I also had to check with the man who’s company sells more of Frisco than anyone: J.P. Piccinini:
Full confession — we asked our readers to give us the skinny on some of the best neighborhoods and communities that really embrace the whole trick-or-treat, neighborly fun of Halloween. 
Dallas-Fort Worth housing inventory is increasing, which could be good news for buyers, and three separate cities placed at the top of two different growth charts. We’ll explain in this week’s roundup of real estate news.
Frisco was named the best city for raising a family, closely followed by Allen, and Southlake as part of a new 2018 “best Texas cities” list, ranking the best and worst Texas cities for families. Wallethub, a D.C.-based personal finance site, compiled the new June 2018 report that ranked the 117 largest cities in Texas based on family life, fun, education, health and safety, affordability and socioeconomic environment.
