Here come home buyers!

DALLAS. You don’t have to be an Einstein to understand a theory price relativity. Do you know how when you paid $2.40 a gallon of gasoline and then the price went up to $2.89, you went crazy? But as it continued to rise to nearly $4/gallon, $2.89/gallon began to look like a bargain.

Could the same thing happen to houses? Just look at these major metros from the beginning of 2022 until almost the middle of the year:

According to the Texas Real Estate Research Center, the median price in DFW has risen from $360,000 to $429,000. The value of Houston rose from $307,000 to $351,000. Austin roared from $480,000 to $550,000. And San Antonio went from $300,000 to $337,000. In the second half of the year, prices did not return to their original values, but fell significantly.

The median home price has dropped to $385,000 in D-FW. Prices in Houston fell to 330 thousand dollars. The median home price in Austin has dropped to $457,000. And prices in San Antonio have cooled again to $322,000. Mortgage interest rates also rose sharply last year, but have come down in recent weeks.

With these pullbacks in prices and mortgage rates, pay attention to the buyers. Real estate broker Joe Atkins of Joe Atkins Realty says he’s seeing a surge in interest right now.

“I’m telling you, I started noticing that things start to change in the second week of January… and I thought, ‘Wow! Activity rates have doubled, if not tripled, from a month earlier,” Atkins said.

This is our latest test of all the fluctuations in the housing market in the pandemic era with Atkins. He painted a picture for us in 2020, 2021 and again and again in the wild 2022.

Atkins just told us how he just posted a new listing for the sale of the house: “And… I mean, we put it up today at 9am and it’s scheduled for seven showings tomorrow!”

We might have thought that maybe it was just because it was a fresh listing for buyers. But recently, Atkins also had a rather outdated list: a house for sale that had been sitting there all the holidays. His contract just got cancelled. And then boom.

“I got a few offers on him a week ago, and not just a few, a few cash offers,” Atkins said.

Atkins has heard similar stories from others, such as one agent who had just made an offer to buy a house for $400,000.

“She said she lost and from what she heard she walked out for $50,000 for a few offers,” he said.

It sounds like a wild jump from the start of last year. But Atkins says it’s definitely not as crazy as last year.

Of course, these are observations from only one real estate broker in North Texas, but they give an idea of ​​what happens in January and February, which are traditionally a quiet period in the real estate industry.