North Texas home sales and prices continued to rise in March from a year earlier.
But last month's home sales snapshot mostly reflects contracts signed in January and February, before the pandemic hit.
North Texas real estate agents sold 9,316 single-family homes in March — 4% more than in the same month in 2019, according to new data from the Real Estate Center at Texas A&M University and the North Texas Real Estate Information Systems.
"April and May are going to be the telling months," said James Gaines, chief economist of the Real Estate Center. "The first half of March, we were still gearing up for all the shelter-in-place."
With March's positive sales, a record 23,067 single-family homes were sold during the first quarter through real estate agents' multiple listing service — 9% more than a year earlier and a record number of area home purchases for the first three months of the year.
"Spurred by ultra-low mortgage rates, January and February new and existing home sales were exceptionally strong," said Ted Wilson, principal with Dallas-based housing analyst Residential Strategies Inc. "It was not until mid-March, when sheltering in place became widespread, that prospective buyer traffic slumped.
"Certainly a complication for existing home listings is the inability for Realtors to show occupied houses," he said. "Internet marketing and virtual tours have surged in recent weeks as agents and sales teams adapt to the new requirements of social distancing."
Median home sales prices in North Texas rose 4% year-over-year in March to $270,000. For the entire quarter, median sales prices were 6% higher than in first quarter 2019.
March is likely to be the last month for a while that Dallas-Fort Worth home sales are higher than in the previous year.
With shelter-in-place orders and the economic shock of the coronavirus epidemic, real estate agents are reporting big declines in homebuyer traffic and falling sales.
At the end of March, pending home sales — properties under contract but not yet sold — were down 10% from the same month in 2019. And pending condo and townhouse sales were down more than 30%.
As would be expected, sellers are putting fewer houses on the market because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The number of North Texas new home sales listings in March fell 9% from 2019 and total homes for sale in the area were down 10% year-over-year in the more than two dozen counties included in the survey.
There was only a 2.3-month supply of single-family homes listed for sale in the area at the end of March.
