Is El Paso In a Real Estate Boom Right Now?

My wife and I have been talking about getting a new house for a few years now. We were looking at houses even before we got married. But it feels like things have finally started to line up for us and we will hopefully be moving this year. Just what is the housing market like in El Paso? Someone over on Reddit asked this question because apparently their parents over at Kern Place have been bombarded with offers to buy their home. "liberaltx" asked:

My parents live in Kern and suddenly they being deluged with offers to buy their home? What is going on?

Here are some of the responses.

SyntheticOne said:

El Paso demand is normal, about 600 units per month plus or minus 100. Like the rest of the country, it is the lower supply that is causing the frantic market. Our supply for single family houses is about 1,700 units while more typically we have 5,000.

The New York Times recently published and analysis (well done) and that link is here.

In short, the article gives 7 causes for low supply. Five are covid-related, one is due to low interest rates where some buyers elect to keep their old house as a rental when buying a new home, and one is some builders left the market after the 2008 down turn.

So yes, now is the best time ever to be a seller in El Paso; we now have the highest prices ever and the lowest Months of Inventory (MOI) ever. Opinions vary, but mine is we are heading for a post-covid crash that will last 5 to 10 years, globally. We will start to see the supply rise once forbearance and the moratorium on evictions are lifted, probably sometime this summer or early fall.

We put our house up for sale last summer, priced it on the high side and had four full price offers within two days.

iMakeMoneyiLoseMoney said:

Yes and it’s a sellers market. There is very little inventory and houses are getting multiple offers over asking the first day on the market. My BF is a realtor if they’d like an honest opinion on the house with no strings attached. My parents live in Kern and I live in Mission Hills so I know the area very well. They should never engage with cold calls like that obviously.

There were also some people talking about how we have more Californians moving here and that is causing the demand to spike. When we were out looking last summer we met with a few builders and one of them told us that they were about to run out of land. Sounds strange, right? We have all kinds of land surrounding El Paso. But what he was talking about is land that they could actually put houses. This might have changed over the past 6 months, but he seemed to be legitimately concerned.

I check Zillow daily for houses. From what I've seen, for the price range and search criteria I use, nicer houses seem to be popping up. That would tell me that the market isn't in a boom right now. Then again, I'm just basing this on Zillow, which doesn't really mean anything. But for a good laugh, here's the SNL skit they did on Zillow.