Southern Dallas scored big wins in the 2015 housing market.
Residential districts stretching from Oak Cliff to Ellis County had some of the largest gains in home prices and sales last year.
At the same time, home sales stuttered in northern suburbs where a lack of homes on the market cut into 2015 sales totals.
Demand for affordable housing led the big price gains in residential districts in Southeast Dallas, Cedar Hill, Kaufman and Ellis counties, according to year-end North Texas home price data from the Real Estate Center at Texas A&M University.
Preowned home sales for last year rose by 12 to 20 percent in those markets, compared to less than a 5 percent 2015 home sales rise in the almost 50 North Texas markets The Dallas Morning News tracks each quarter.
Home sales and prices in some of those southern residential districts were still making up ground lost during the housing crash, real estate agents say.
Home sales price appreciation was a factor in almost every Dallas-area neighborhood in 2015.
The biggest price gains were in Southeast Dallas and Oak Cliff (median price up 24 percent from 2014), The Colony and Southern Dallas (up 22 percent) and Euless (up 19 percent).
These areas all saw strong home sales last year.
Home inventories were the tightest in The Colony, Bedford and Richardson with less than a one-month supply.
Mesquite, Carrollton-Farmers Branch, Garland, Plano, Grand Prairie, Grapevine, Sachse-Rowlett, Wylie and McKinney all had less than a 1.5-month inventory of houses on the market with real estate agents last year.
More than 62,000 preowned single-family homes were sold by real estate agents last year in the Dallas-area—an all-time high number of property purchases.
Most analysts are forecasting a decline in housing activity this year unless more properties come on the market.
