Fort Worth’s housing market cools. Here’s what that means for buyers and sellers
People looking to buy a home in Fort Worth have a lot more options.
The number of listings in April was the highest it’s been since September 2012, according to data from Texas A&M’s Real Estate Research Center.
The city’s housing inventory — the measure of how long it would take to sell every home on the market — also hit a more than decade high mark in April at 3.8 months, according to data from the Greater Fort Worth Association of Realtors.
That’s the highest it’s been since January 2013.
While more people are selling their homes, fewer people are buying. Sales have been down for the past three months, according to Texas A&M data.
Still, real estate agents emphasized the lackluster number didn’t paint the whole picture. While some homes are staying on the market longer, others are going fast after receiving multiple offers above the asking price.
Researchers say it’s too early to know whether the weak sales numbers are part of a larger trend. Prices are still going up, but not as fast as they were in 2021 and 2022.
What researchers see with Fort Worth home prices
Fort Worth’s housing market has been softening for the past three years, said Adam Perdue, a director at the housing research firm Zonda.
While prices shot up during the COVID-19 pandemic, prices have leveled off since interest rates started increasing in early 2022.
“The surprising thing over the last two or three years is that it didn’t slow down more,” Perdue said.
The last few months have been low on sales, but there’s not enough data to say the market is doing anything more than staying flat, he said.
“You could probably find an economist that’ll tell you that we’re all going to die cause the last few months have been a little low, but I don’t like doing that,” he said.
We saw similar weak sales numbers in early 2024, but the market stabilized and there were increased home sales toward the end of the year, said Yanling Mayer, a research economist at Texas A&M’s Real Estate Research Center.
With all the uncertainty about the economy, it’s not clear whether we’ll see a similar spike in home sales toward the end of 2025, she said.
Fort Worth isn’t alone in seeing weaker than expected home sales. Nationally, home sales were down 3.1% in March compared to the same period in 2024.
However, strong migration to Texas is keeping demand higher than the national average, Mayer said.
Mortgage rates are expected to stay relatively stable in the near-term, but that won’t help the housing affordability crisis, Mayer said.
An August 2023 report from the city of Fort Worth found a family earning the city’s median income couldn’t afford a median priced home.
Home price increases are weakening, but they’re not coming down to the level where they would be affordable, Mayer said.
What Realtors are seeing in Fort Worth
In general, there are more people selling their homes than buying homes right now, said Fort Worth Realtor and property tax consultant Chandler Crouch.
However, Crouch said he just sold a home for above the listing price that got multiple offers.
“It all depends on what’s going on in your backyard. Literally,” Crouch said.
Places like Azle and Haslet are seeing a lot of interest, especially with new home construction, said Paul Epperley, president of the Greater Fort Worth Association of Realtors.
Homes around Benbrook and Cleburne saw the biggest jump in sale activity through the three months of 2025, according to Texas A&M data.
The fact that there’s more homes for sale shows that there’s still a lot of confidence in the market, Epperley said.
Buyers can be a little more choosy and not necessarily put an offer on the first home they see, he said.
“I can tell you from my own personal business that things are very busy right now,” Epperley said, adding that he’s not seeing a slowdown in people looking for homes, rather people are taking more time with their selections.
There has been an uptick in the number homes selling for under their listing price, however, Epperley said this may be an indication that sellers haven’t adjusted their expectations from the hot housing market immediately following the pandemic.
Prices aren’t going up as much, which means we’ll start to see a more balanced market between buyers and sellers.
Both Crouch and Epperley said the closed sales number on monthly activity reports can sometimes be deceiving.
It relies on individual Realtors going into a computer and marking that a house was sold, Crouch said.
The more accurate statistic is active listings, which were up 31.7% in April, according to data from the Greater Fort Worth Association of Realtors.
That could mean demand is down, but that’s not entirely unexpected, Crouch said.
Right now people aren’t moving unless they have to, and if you have a 3% mortgage, you’re not going to give that up easily, he said.
Who’s affected by leveling of home prices?
With the flattening of home prices, the biggest effect is on people who bought their homes in 2022, Crouch said.
That’s when interest rates started to spike leading to home price increases to slow down.
If you bought your home before rising interest rates, you probably have more equity in your home, Crouch said.
That means when it comes time to move into a new home, you’ll be able to use that equity to afford a lower monthly payment even with the higher mortgage rates, he said.
If you purchased your house after early 2022, the slower price growth means you probably don’t have as much equity, Crouch said.
Home owners could also potentially be affected by a flat housing market, said researcher Perdue.
If home values stay flat instead of increasing 3% to 4% every year with inflation, your home could potentially be losing value, he said.
Still a flat market isn’t scary for people who keep paying their mortgages and building up equity in their homes, he said.
One of the positives for Fort Worth and Texas in general is strong growth, Perdue said.
Fort Worth recently passed the million resident mark, and is among the fastest growing large cities in the country, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
All that added growth helps buoy Texas relative to the rest of the United States, he said.
This story was originally published June 9, 2025 at 5:50 AM.
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