Apparently we are all long overdue for a raise.
The ability to afford a home in Dallas-Fort Worth has become more difficult in recent years, in large part due to the rising cost of real estate.
The Dallas area was third in the country — behind only Seattle and Portland — with an 8.6 percent rise in year over year housing prices, according to the most recent S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller U.S. National Home Price NSA Index.
But there is another factor that limits the purchasing power of the average North Texan.
“There is concern. Certainly the inflation that we have seen in housing has far outpaced the increase that we've seen in wages across this market,” said Ted Wilson, Principal of Residential Strategies in Dallas, a firm that studies real estate market trends in the Dallas area.
According to the Texas Workforce Commission, a state agency “charged with overseeing and providing workforce development services to employers and job seekers of Texas,” wages in the Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington Metropolitan Statistical Area have risen only moderately in the last decade.
Taking into account non-government workers from varied industry, the average hourly earnings for an employee in the DFW area in May 2007 were $23.98. Ten years later, that figure had risen about 11 percent to $26.96 per hour.
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In that same time, the price of a home has risen much more dramatically, according to Case-Shiller, which studies home price trends in major markets across the country and converts them to a score. In May 2007 that score for the Dallas area was 125.49. Ten years later, the Dallas housing market score increased 39.7 percent to 175.26.
