Hamstrung by a flagging financial system, the U.S. real estate market tumbled from raging bull to limping bear. But what's up in Cowtown? Is housing hobbled or is our prime position still secure?

Dateline

USA, pre-summer 2008. For all practical purposes, the economy is pretty stout. Portfolios are performing. Banks are lending. Companies are hiring. Consumers are buying. And the residential real estate industry is going great guns, with values rising, housing starts accelerating and mortgage lenders readily opening their vaults to practically anyone. The word “recession” isn’t so much as a blip on Uncle Sam’s radar screen. Everything is copacetic … or so it seems.

Fast forward to fall 2008. That boom went bust. We know far too well what happened next, as the subprime mortgage meltdown knocked the wind from the already-wheezy real estate world. With a chilling mix of panic and slack-jawed incredulity, we’ve witnessed the resultant shockwaves fracture countless industries, the effects far-reaching, life-altering, and devastating. And as for housing itself, values are plummeting, foreclosures are soaring, funding is frozen and starts are at a standstill.

State of the Market

But just how abysmal is the local housing market? Does the dreary national data portend more doom and gloom in our neck of the woods? Or, in the face of the lethargic economy, are we actually doing OK? And the question that’s on the tips of everyone’s lips: Is the end—and, dare we say, a recovery—in sight?

“Credit extension has certainly thrown the housing market on its nose in lots of places in the country, but most people in the industry understand it’s a whole lot worse in other parts of the country,” says Ted Wilson, principal of Dallas-based Residential Strategies. “This is the growth area of the country, the part where the economy is probably going to turn around the quickest, and the housing market that— while taken its lumps— hasn’t been as hard hit.”

Tammie Harding, executive VP of Fort Worth-based Intrust Mortgage, concurs. “We never saw the very unrealistic appreciation that some areas of the East and West coasts were seeing,” she says. “We had a steady 3 to 5 percent [appreciation] a year, which is good and healthy, so we didn’t have the big fall that some of the other states have had.”