Edinburg, McAllen: housing market on the rise

EDINBURG, McALLEN – Sold signs hang next to new, single-family homes as open fields along Sugar Rd. continue to disappear in Edinburg.

“The economy is beginning to rebound and pretty much stabilizing now,” said Shavi Mahtani, owner of real estate development firm Domain Development. “It’s definitely on the upward trend."

Edinburg’s new housing development, Summerset Estates, has more than 100 lots where custom luxury homes feature vaulted ceilings, stone floors and castle-like turrets.

The asking price for one of the four-bedroom/three-bath 3,241-sf homes is $259,000.

These lots are a small fraction of the 57,818 homes sold in Texas during first quarter 2015 — about a 4 percent increase from first quarter 2014, according to the Texas Quarterly Housing Report compiled by the Texas Association of Texas and The Real Estate Center at Texas A&M University.

The report found that while there is increased demand for new homes the biggest gap is in the entry-level market. There is increasing demand for smaller homes in the $200,000 to $250,000 range.

The first quarter average price of a single-family home in McAllen was $128,305. That is slightly more than half the average statewide price of $240,303, according to the report.

“Home affordability is the key, in the McAllen area we have about 12 months worth of inventory, but that is down 14 months from a year ago,” said Adrian A. Arriaga, owner of AAA Real Estate & Investments, a commercial real estate firm in McAllen.

“That’s a 12 percent decrease, but in first quarter people don’t buy houses, they usually do it in the summer time because of family.”

No ad doesn’t mean sunscreen! See McAllen-Edinburg Market Research, McAllen-Edinburg NewsTalk and Brownsville-Harlingen NewsTalk.