Dallas-Fort Worth is seeing a dramatic increase in homes up for sale over the last few weeks as many sellers look to take advantage of the market while it’s still red hot.   The number of active home listings last week spiked 41.6% from a year prior, the fifth consecutive week of gains, according to Realtor.com. Until April, the company posted supply declines in D-FW every week since March 2020.

The region saw the highest annual growth for any week on record since the company began tracking this figure in 2017.

New listings in D-FW rose 32.4% last week, signaling a huge influx of sellers putting homes on the market as summer approaches.  “Sellers have been hearing for about two years what an amazing time it is for them to sell … and they’ve seen their equity just grow like crazy,” said Mike Reddell, senior executive vice president and managing director for Douglas Elliman Real Estate in Dallas. “With the stock market being wobbly and mortgage rates rising, I think sellers that have been thinking about this for a while, more of them are pulling the trigger and putting the house up for sale.”

Reddell said if he were in a position to sell his house, he would do it right now.

Redfin reported May 15 that new listings throughout the U.S. climbed nearly twice as quickly as they did at the same time last year.   “Rising mortgage rates have caused the housing market to shift, and now home sellers are in a hurry to find a buyer before demand weakens further,” Daryl Fairweather, chief economist for Redfin, said in a statement.

Mark Wolfe, broker and owner of RE/MAX DFW Associates, said he has seen a significant spike in listings over the past few months. In his home city of Coppell, he said, there would have been only about five or six homes on the market at any one time a few months ago. In just five days last week, he said, 21 homes went up for sale.  “We’ve been a boom economy, and now with the economy showing signs of trouble, people want to still get the most for their dollar while they can if they think that the prices might go down,” Wolfe said. “I don’t know if that’s going to happen. I doubt that’s going to happen.”

The market is nowhere near balanced between buyers and sellers. Dallas-Fort Worth had just under a month of home supply in April, according to the Texas Real Estate Research Center at Texas A&M University. A balanced market would have about six months’ worth of inventory.   The competitive pressures have sustained high price growth over the past few months. The median home in April sold for $425,576, up 25% from a year earlier. The number of sales in April was down 7% from a year ago, but the dollar volume increased 13% to $4.2 billion.

Rising mortgage rates combined with record-high home prices have drastically increased the monthly cost of buying a home. Homebuilders have also noticed demand cool down through the past few months.  “We’ve been in an unrealistic market for two years, and we’re probably headed back to a normal market,” Wolfe said. “It might be nice to just have a healthy even market. I’m hopeful that’s what we’re going to go into.”

• Dallas Morning News, May 31, 2022