Today’s lending environment is completely different, and the nation is still adding jobs.

Real estate experts expect the Dallas-Fort Worth housing market to continue to cool down. What they’re not anticipating is a 2008-style housing crash.  “If you’ve been reading the national press and so forth, they’ll tell you the sky is falling,” Jim Gaines, an economist at the Texas Real Estate Research Center at Texas A&M University, told a crowd of real estate agents Friday at the MetroTex Association of Realtors’ annual housing forecast. “Well, I’m here to tell you the sky isn’t really falling; it’s raining.”   September home sales sank 17% year over year in September, the fourth consecutive month of sales declines, according to the Texas Real Estate Research Center and North Texas Real Estate Information Systems data.  Gaines said it is debatable whether the economy is currently in a recession. The country has had two consecutive quarters of negative gross domestic product growth, an indicator of a recession, but the nation and especially Dallas-Fort Worth are still adding jobs. He projects the D-FW area will have year-over-year job growth 6% in 2022, up from 4.7% in 2021.  He added that even if this is a recession, Texas has been resilient through the last three U.S. recessions.   Gaines said the U.S. economy is working to revert to normal after an unhealthy level of inflation. In housing, he said, there will not be a wave of foreclosures and problems unless millions of jobs are lost.

• Dallas Morning News, October 8, 2022