I usually like Chuck Marohn, but it is a glaring problem when you claim that housing prices are falling in Dallas, and then talk about housing prices skyrocketing in Dallas, within a couple of paragraphs.
The 'sharpest rises' are from a long-term trend of a decade [2]:
> Over the past decade, the median home price has increased by 134 percent in Phoenix, 133 percent in Miami, 129 percent in Atlanta, and 99 percent in Dallas. (Over that same stretch, prices in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles have increased by about 75 percent, 76 percent, and 97 percent, respectively).
Here's my pictorial illustration of the curve because I like drawing silly plots in txt
|
| ____
| ___/ \ } Jan-April 2025
| ___/
| ___/
|_/____________________
| | |
2015.....2020.....2025
[2]https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/06/zoning-s...
To thine own self be true!
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CSUSHPINSA
Here is another interesting chart:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?id=CSUSHPINSA,SFXRNSA,LXX...,
Which place seems more expensive since 2000? Can you see the big drop in 2025?
I think the story of Atlanta and Dallas is a story of cheap housing being available for a long time until it started to get used up. In Atlanta, it's not just exurban development, a lot of in-city neighborhoods had some growing ability. But the mixture of people relocating to Atlanta and the constraints of a car-based city with difficult zoning have basically stopped new supply. Small single-family houses get replaced with larger single-family houses and the missing middle is harder to find.
DFW was seen as a pretty affordable place a while ago. In 2015 could get a 2,200sqft 4-bedroom house with a larger lot and a pool for $250k pretty easily. By 2020 that price was $320k, still decently affordable, still seen as a pretty cheap place to buy a home. By 2022 the valuations had exploded. Houses down the street of similar quality were selling days after listing at $550-600k. This then leveled off, settling around $550k. Houses around that price were still seeming to move pretty quickly.
Now I have neighbors cutting prices. A neighbor trying to sell has had their house on the market for months. They've already cut about $70k from their original listing price. Three more houses nearby have also entered the market and have been around for a few weeks. Compared to just a couple of years ago where the average house was on the market for maybe a couple of weeks.