The Property Game
You want to buy an affordable house in Fort Worth? Good luck with that.
If you're a first-time homebuyer in Fort Worth, we have some not-so-good news to report: Affordable housing is vanishing. It's a national phenomenon, according to real estate website Trulia, as the number of starter homes has dropped 43.6 percent across the country since 2012. But things are especially grim in Fort Worth.
Trulia took all the available homes on the market in the first quarter of 2016 and split them into three sections based on price: starter homes, trade-up homes, and premium homes. In Fort Worth, Trulia says a starter home now has a median list price of $89,950, a trade-up can most likely be yours for $160,625, and a premium home costs $365,975.
Locally, the inventory for starter homes is down 60.8 percent from the first quarter of 2012. Even more troubling, inventory is down 70.1 percent in the trade-up category — which means Fort Worth has seen the sixth most dramatic shrinkage there among the 100 markets analyzed.
Only 17.2 percent of all homes listed in Fort Worth since the beginning of 2016 are classified as starter homes; 20.9 percent qualify as trade-ups. So if you're looking for homes priced at $160,000 or less, you'll likely end up in a bidding war — or you won't find anything at all.
Premium homes, on the other hand, account for more than 61.9 percent of the available inventory so far this year, with 2,332 available homes, compared to a measly 647 starter homes.
Austin and San Antonio have suffered worse declines than Fort Worth in starter-home inventory, but prices here have gone up a significant amount — 29.5 percent — in that bracket. The median list price in the trade-up category has seen similar increases, at 28.9 percent.
Sure sounds like a good time to sell, though.
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