Dallas–Fort Worth Home Prices Eased 0.6% in September — While Austin's Fell 9.8%, the Steepest Drop in the Nation

Dallas–Fort Worth's housing market cooled gently in September while the state's capital cooled harder than anywhere else in the country. The Texas Flyover's Monday briefing, reporting September asking-price figures, put Austin's median asking price at $446,450 — down 9.8 percent from a year earlier, the nation's steepest drop among the 50 largest metro areas. Houston's median dipped 1.7 percent over the same year. Dallas–Fort Worth's fell 0.6 percent — a decline, but an order of magnitude smaller than Austin's.

The spread between the three Texas metros is the story for Metroplex buyers and sellers reading the fall market. A 0.6 percent year-over-year easing in asking prices does not reprice a Dallas or Fort Worth neighborhood; it signals a market where sellers' opening numbers have stopped climbing and started, slightly, to give. Austin's 9.8 percent drop, by contrast, reprices whole segments — and it arrives in the metro that spent the pandemic years posting the state's fastest price growth, which is the context that makes a near-double-digit annual decline possible there and not, on these figures, here.

The Flyover's figures are asking prices — what sellers list, not what buyers finally pay — and the desk reports them as exactly that, with no sales-volume or inventory claims attached. What they establish on their own terms is a ranking North Texas readers can use: among the big Texas metros in September, Dallas–Fort Worth's asking prices were the steadiest, Houston's softened modestly, and Austin's fell the fastest in America. For a Metroplex household deciding whether this is the fall to buy, that is a calmer market to enter than the one an hour and a half down I-35 is offering.