The City Where People Have Walked Away From Buying Homes

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Oct 22, 12:05PM EDT

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The City Where People Have Walked Away From Buying Homes — © Sean Pavone / iStock via Getty Images

The residential housing market in the U.S. has changed radically in a few months. Home prices were skyrocketing earlier this year. Interest rates, at 3% for 30-year fixed loans, were at multi-decade highs. Today, home prices in many metros have started to fall. Mortgage rates are just shy of 7%. The situation has become so difficult that people have started to break the purchase contracts they have agreed to. The city where this activity is highest is San Antonio. Several other cities join it as measured by this yardstick across Texas and Florida, according to a new study.
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Home prices jumped 20% yearly in most large cities from early 2021 until a few months ago. Realtor.com just released a new study of the housing market. Titled “Home Sales, Listings Plunge Over 20% in September—Most on Record Aside From Pandemic Start” it focuses on September data. The drop in listings even eclipses figures for the housing Armageddon in 2008/2009 that triggered a record number of mortgage defaults and foreclosures.

Home price increases have stopped nationwide. They remain very close to record levels. The median price of a home for sale in September was $403,797. This dropped .5% from the previous quarter but rose 7.6% from a year ago. New home listings in September dropped 22.4% to 503,156. The number of homes sold for the listing prices plunged to 32%. A year ago, the figure was closer to half of all sales.

Broken contracts are a sign of buyer desperation. The figure was 17% nationwide in September.

San Antonio has been one of the fastest-growing large metros in America in terms of population. The four big cities in Texas to post population growth from 2020 to 2021. The others were Austin, Houston, and Dallas. The numbers were similar in most large Florida cities and in Phoenix.

Of the pending home sales in September, 25.3% were broken in San Antonio. The figure was above 20% in Houston, Dallas, Tampa, Miami, Jacksonville, and Phoenix.

One theory about these cities is that their surges in population drove home demand rapidly. Prices rose along with that. This made each among the most expensive housing markets in the country. As mortgage rates rose, homes in these cities started to become unaffordable.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.