With the summer homebuying season underway, one analyst has some surprising information on where the bargains in Texas homes might be.
Jeff Ostrowski, housing analyst for BankRate, the home buying software website, is bullish on the state because four out of the top 10 cities for good home buys are here.
The number one city that's friendly to homebuyers, according to the list, is the South Texas city of McAllen, because of its wide array of homes for sale at relatively affordable prices.
"The flip side," Ostrowski says, "is it's not a good time to be a seller in the McAllen metro area, but if you're a buyer you can pretty much have your pick and you can negotiate."
Also on Bankrate's top ten good buyers' markets are San Antonio at number 3, Austin at number 4 and Houston at number 10.
"The Texas markets are good buyers' markets just because the supply of new construction was spurred by the economic growth in many of these markets," he says.
If you go looking online for some of the homes available in these cities, you might be put off by the number of houses that have been sitting on the market for months, possibly implying that they're substandard or defective, but Ostrowski refutes that.
"That's not really what's happening. The Texas markets are buyers' markets just because there was so much positive economic activity in these markets up until not long ago.
There was a huge increase in new homes that were built, but they have not been sold yet because increases in mortgage costs reduced the available buyers, so they're are still on the market in addition to existing homes for sale, he says.