Midland housing market outsizzles giants

Midland may lack the signature clam chowder or sourdough, but it now has something that Boston and San Francisco do not: the nation’s hottest housing market.

TheWest Texas oil town landed the top spot for April among 300 metro areas tracked by realtor.com’s Market Hotness Index, which measures time-on-themarket data and listings views per property.

The shale drilling boom is no doubt fueling the demand, as Midland’s population has swelled by more than 20 percent since 2010, to 136,000, the U.S. Census Bureau says. The supply of homes for sale there is a scant 1.1 months, the Texas A&M Real Estate Center reports. Six months is considered a balanced market.

Realtor.com found homes in Midland stayed on the market for 30 days in April, with inventory moving 34 percent faster than a year earlier. Home listings fetched an average of 824 views per month on realtor.com, a rate 2.7 higher than the U.S. average.

Homes in the Houston metro area, by comparison, stayed on the market a median of 45 days, putting the city at No. 191 on the hotness list, in the company of Ocala, Fla., New York and Birmingham, Ala.

And though Midland’s median list price of $299,000 on realtor.com is higher than Houston’s, it remains a relative bargain nationally. The figure for Boston is $749,000 and it’s even higher for San Francisco — $1.29 million.