Riley Rosvold , carrying oldest son Brooks, 2, embraced his mother, Pat, carrying her youngest grandson, Baylor, as they became emotional after the moving truck arrived at their newly purchased house March 30 in Celina. The Rosvold family moved to Texas from Washington.At 4 a.m. on a Thursday morning in early May, Mike and Kendra Gibson of Commerce headed to the hospital to have their second child, Birdie.
There were only 2,418 homes listed for sale in Dallas-Fort Worth in March, down 88% from the 20,853 available two years ago, according to the Texas Real Estate Research Center at Texas A&M University. Homebuying is already a “very emotional process, and a very stressful process,” Luong said. “Once you add this crazy market to it, it makes it even worse.”
In the middle of last April, Mike Gibson was offered a job as an estate manager and private chef for a family at a large estate in North Dallas’ Preston Hollow neighborhood. He and Kendra had less than two months to sell their home in Commerce and move to the Dallas area, more than an hour away. “We realized at that point, we would have to lower our standards to pay over asking, to get a house,” Kendra said.
The sellers declined their offer of $25,000 over the asking price that night. Early the next morning, Kendra went into labor. Kendra and the baby spent the night in the hospital. The next day, as they were getting in the car to leave the hospital, they got word that they were under contract. “We came from the country, where it was 15 minutes to get anywhere at all,” Kendra said. “We miss parts of the country, but to move to such a sweet community made it a lot easier.”Jacob and Monika Thompson moved from New Braunfels to Frisco last year after months of searching for a home.
The couple, who have two kids — one 16 and the other 7 — had decided to move from New Braunfels to Frisco early last year. They frequently visited friends there, and the more they made the trip, the more they liked the area, especially for its schools and diversity. They put offers on homes every weekend for three months. Starting out, they would offer $25,000 over the asking price, and eventually they started offering $50,000 more.
“They’re benefits that people have earned,” Blankenship said. “It turned into a hurdle that we had to clear.” Pele and Vonda Nunley have been on the hunt for a larger house since late 2020. The couple has two sons, one a 19-year-old student at Louisiana State University and the other a 15-year-old who goes to Grace Preparatory Academy in Arlington, where his mother is the principal.
The scarcity of housing is affecting prices in all segments of the market. In March 2020, 1,142 homes were on the market in North Texas for $1 million or more, according to Multiple Listing Service data. Two years later, there were 407 homes on the market for that price.“We kind of had an idea of how much we wanted to spend and what we thought we would be getting for that,” Pele said.
“It’s a sad process, and it’s a frustrating process,” Vonda said. “We have faith that one day, our dream house will come and everything will fall into place the way it’s supposed to.”March 30 was an exciting day for Riley and Amanda Rosvold and their two sons, one who turns 2 in April and one who’s almost 3 months old. The moving truck was arriving at their new home in Celina’s Light Farms community, capping off a move halfway across the country from Ridgefield, Wash., near Portland.
On two homes, one in Prosper and the other in Celina, they didn’t even get a chance to put in an offer because they were off the market by the end of the day they looked. The Celina house sold for more than $100,000 over its asking price of $630,000, according to the Rosvolds’ agent, Leigh Calvert of Douglas Elliman.