Home prices, sales up again in November

North Texas home sales and prices were both up again in November.

And if current trends hold, median home sales prices in the area will show one of the biggest annual increases in decades.

Through the first 11 months of 2015, sales prices for preowned homes sold by real estate agents in North Texas are 11 percent higher than where they were in November 2014, according to the Real Estate Center at Texas A&M University.

The price jump so far this year is more than twice the average annual price increase in the area during the last decade.

While some forecasts call for a decline next year in the rate of local home price gains, market watchers say that as long as supplies of homes for sale remain tight and demand is strong, prices will shoot up.

Consumers are paying the price.

“It’s becoming problematic, and affordability is a big issue,” said Ted Wilson of Dallas housing analyst Residential Strategies Inc. “Sales will eventually slow down if you continue to escalate prices at that rate. I don’t see any signs of a slowdown in pricing over the near term.”

At the end of November, the median sales price of single-family homes sold by North Texas Realtors was $204,000. That’s up 9 percent from a year earlier.

Even with the higher costs, November’s home sales were 8 percent higher than in 2014, according to data from the Real Estate Center and North Texas Real Estate Information Systems. Real estate agents sold 6,504 houses and 446 condominiums last month.

Only about a 2.4-month supply of homes for sale was listed for sale with Realtors in the almost two dozen counties included in the monthly sales report.

For the second month in a row, the number of houses on the market in North Texas was 1 percent higher than in 2014.

But Wilson said such a small increase isn’t enough to meet demand.

“We are still short thousands of houses in listings — it’s a big number,” he said.

On average, it took 45 days to sell homes that closed in November, 20 percent less time than in November 2014.

Pending sales remain high, with more than 7,300 houses under contract, 33 percent more than a year earlier.

Twitter: @SteveBrownDMN

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