Real Estate: A Truly Local Market

Well, I was recently reminded about how local the real estate market truly is. As part of our move my wife and I were recently looking for houses in North Dallas. I was fully expecting to see many houses on the market for a long period of time. However, the reality was that there aren't that many houses on the market in North Dallas (I houses for sale are up about 25% y/y in Dallas) and that many of the good houses were selling in two weeks or less. Towards the end of our house-hunting trip we saw a house that we liked. It had been on the market for only one day. We decided to put in an offer and I cringed as my wife basically took the contract from my hand an wrote something just below the asking price on our offer. However, she was right. That house ended up having four offers in its first day on the market. We ultimately ended up pursuing another house, but it was definitely an interesting reminder that national headlines about how slow the real estate market is don't necessarily mean that any one particular neighborhood or market are necessarily slow. I just hope our neighborhood in Denver is as healthy as the one in Dallas was...