Photo courtesy WFAA
DALLAS (WBAP/KLIF News) — Texas is nothing if not wide open spaces, cheap land and low cost housing but that’s changing.
Texas A&M Real Estate Center published a study last week showing the cost of land and homes increasing across the state as a result of economic and population growth.
The Houston Chronicle reports the median price of a house in Texas rose from $138,000 in 2011 to $230,500 last month. While costs are still lower than the rest of the U.S. as a whole the increases in the Lone Star State are due largely to the increasing values of land. In 2016 Dallas land cost accounted for 29.4 percent of the cost of a home while in Fort Worth it was 22.4 percent. Those percentages are still lower than the national average but immigration from other states has fueled competition for new homes especially in large metropolitan regions.
While it’s true there are still vast stretches of Texas that are uninhabited it’s the hot local economies that attract corporations and employees from other states. Texas A&M Chief Economist Jim Gaines says spreading out is a matter of finding ways to develop land in cost-efficient ways.
