Best places to retire in Texas

🪄 Manifesting a marvelous Tuesday for all.

Today's newsletter is 679 words, a 3.5-minute read.

1. Average buyer’s agent commission ticks up under new NAR rules

According to a new Redfin report, the average buyer’s agent commission reached 2.42% for homes sold in the third quarter, up from 2.36% a year earlier.

Commissions were nearly unchanged from the second quarter (2.43%), stabilizing after small increases over the previous three quarters.

2. Home prices surge nearly 55% over the past 5 years

A new report from the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) shows that home prices nationwide climbed 54.9% between Q1 2020 and Q3 2025. More than half of U.S. metro areas outpaced even that rapid growth.

• Odessa, Texas, recorded the smallest increase over the five-year period, rising just 18.3%.

Citing a third-quarter housing price index from the Federal Housing Finance Agency, NAHB noted that home prices were up 3.3% in Q3 2025 compared to the same quarter in 2024, marking the slowest year-over-year appreciation since 2013.

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3. Catch up quick

👴 Best places to retire in Texas. (Travel+Leisure)

⚽ World Cup schedule reveals Houston gets Ronaldo, Dallas gets Messi. (FIFA)

🚀 2026 will be the year of the “great housing reset.” (Redfin)

💸 Home remodeling costs surge in Q3. (NMP)

🏡 Fulshear, Texas, is the biggest boomtown in the nation. (GoBankingRates)

4. Starter-home sales rose 4.9% in October

A new report from Redfin shows that starter-home sales climbed 4.9% year over year in October, helped by increased inventory and modest price growth.

Mid-priced (up 0.7%) and high-priced (up 0.8%) home sales also increased compared to a year earlier, marking a break from a long period of annual declines.

Despite the uptick in demand, starter-home prices are not surging. The typical starter home rose just 2% year over year to $260,000 in October, the second-slowest rate of growth in the last decade.

5. Trump did same 'mortgage fraud' he accuses his targets of

President Trump engaged in mortgage fraud to the same extent as those he has accused of the crime, according to a new investigation from ProPublica.

In 1993, the President signed a mortgage on a house adjacent to his Mar-a-Lago property, stating it would be his primary residence, the nonprofit newsroom found. Just seven weeks later, he took out a mortgage on a second nearby property, again claiming it as his primary residence.

“In reality,” ProPublica reports, “Trump does not appear to have ever lived in either home, let alone used them as a principal residence. Instead, the two homes were used as investment properties and rented out.”

Lying on a mortgage application, the report notes, is “exactly the sort of scenario his administration has pointed to as evidence of fraud.”

6. Austin named the top Texas city for coworking growth

A new study from Coworking Café ranked Austin as the 14th best city with the fastest-growing talent pool, and the only Texas city to make the top 20. The ranking is driven by the city’s booming tech sector and rising rates of telecommuting.

To determine the fastest-growing labor markets, Coworking Café analyzed 102 U.S. cities using four workforce indicators: employment growth, changes in the working-age population, migration inflows, and telecommuting rates.

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