By Bobby Franklin, REALTOR® | North Texas Market Insider™ | Legacy Realty Group – Leslie Majors Team | Serving Ellis County, DFW & Greater North Texas You've seen the signs. Celina. Little Elm. Forney. Anna. Princeton. Beazer Homes has been planting flags across North Texas for years. That's all coming to an end. On August 7, 2026, Dream Finders and Beazer Homes USA announced a...

Federal regulators went looking at what appraisers were actually writing in the open comment boxes on appraisal reports. What they found is the reason the entire form is being scrapped. In a published review of appraisal commentary, the Federal Housing Finance Agency reported that references to race and ethnicity persist in the commentary sections of present-day appraisals, even though the report...

By Bobby Franklin, REALTOR® | North Texas Market Insider™ | Legacy Realty Group – Leslie Majors Team | Serving Dallas-Fort Worth, Ellis County & Greater North Texas | 214-228-0003 | Published August 17, 2026 The Escalation In June's report I made the case that your mortgage rate had stopped being a war story and become a Fed story, and that Kevin Warsh flipping the dot plot from...

Perfect credit. Twenty-five percent down. Still denied. Fannie and Freddie Won’t Finance Neglected Condos, and most North Texas buyers have no idea. Last updated: August 13, 2026. Educational content only. Not legal, tax, lending, or insurance advice. Consult qualified professionals about your specific transaction. A buyer with a 780 credit score, 25 percent down, two years of verified income,...

By Bobby Franklin, REALTOR® | Legacy Realty Group – Leslie Majors Team | North Texas Market Insider Last updated: August 10, 2026 Yes. An HOA can foreclose on your home in Texas. It can do it to a homestead and even while you are current on your mortgage. Interestingly, it is happening more and more often every quarter. But here is the part the viral headlines miss, and it is the part that...

By Bobby Franklin, REALTOR® | North Texas Market Insider™ | Legacy Realty Group – Leslie Majors Team | Serving Dallas-Fort Worth, Ellis County & Greater North Texas | 214-228-0003 | Published August 5, 2026 The Announcement Everyone Read Wrong The Dallas Arboretum confirmed that the 2026 run of The 12 Days of Christmas will be its last, opening November 11 and closing January 3, 2027,...

Last updated: August 4, 2026 The clip is everywhere. Governor Greg Abbott at a podium, directing the Public Utility Commission of Texas and ERCOT to shield Texans from data center infrastructure costs. It made the rounds on Instagram, the commentary accounts picked it up, and now every group chat from Midlothian to Mansfield is asking the same two questions. Here are the answers, stated plainly...

By every measure that actually describes a housing system, this is the strongest market on record. And appreciation isn't one of those measures. Last updated: August 2026 Nobody in Ellis County feels like they're living through the strongest housing market in American history. Prices in DFW have softened for eleven straight months. Appreciation forecasts through 2030 look anemic next to 2021....

Roughly 34% of Dallas-Fort Worth homeowners currently carry a mortgage rate above 5%, according to UT Arlington's housing research. The mortgage lock-in effect is weakening in DFW, with over a third of homeowners experiencing the opposite. The 30-year fixed climbed to 6.66% this week, a one-year high, per Freddie Mac's Primary Mortgage Market Survey. Every feed is running that headline, and it will...

By Bobby Franklin, REALTOR® | North Texas Market Insider™ | Legacy Realty Group – Leslie Majors Team | TREC #0805459 Last updated: July 23, 2026 Ellis County has 29 data center power requests on file totaling roughly 23.9 gigawatts, the most of any county in Texas, and the man who runs the grid has said out loud that most of them will never get built. Hold both of those facts at the...