70.0% of Vista West listings fail — expired, cancelled or withdrawn. That is the worst rate of any market I measure, by a distance. It is also almost entirely an artefact of how the houses are listed, not a statement about what they are worth.
Vista West is in west Fort Worth, a short run from my office.
Across 644 resolved listings in Vista West, 451 of them failed — expired, cancelled or withdrawn without selling. That is a 70.0% listing failure rate. Across the six-county study the figure is 33.6%, and the worst county is Erath at 44%.
Read at face value, that says Vista West is a market where houses do not sell. It is not.
518 of those 644 listings — four out of five — were placed by a single production builder. 78.4% of that builder’s listings ended in expiry, cancellation or withdrawal. The 644 listings sit on only 310 addresses, which is 2.08 listings per address. For comparison, Arlington runs 1.23 and Crowley 1.15.
| Listings recorded at one address | Number of addresses |
|---|---|
| 1 | 146 |
| 2 | 84 |
| 3 | 40 |
| 4 | 16 |
| 5 | 14 |
| 6 or more | 10 |
One address in Vista West carries ten separate listings. Another carries nine. That is not ten failed attempts to sell a family home; it is inventory being re-entered into the MLS as a builder’s availability, pricing and incentives change.
The vintage breakdown settles it:
| Year built | Listings | Share that failed |
|---|---|---|
| 2004–2007 | 69 | 10–33% |
| 2023 | 141 | 63.1% |
| 2024 | 137 | 72.3% |
| 2025 | 169 | 85.8% |
| 2026 | 93 | 96.8% |
The genuine resale stock — the mid-2000s houses that change hands between ordinary owners — fails at 26.0% overall, which is normal for Fort Worth. Everything above that is new inventory, and the newer it is the higher the apparent failure rate, because the most recent listings simply have not sold yet.
There is an obvious competing explanation: that Vista West simply has weaker demand than the newer subdivisions north of the city — fewer employers nearby, less retail, and the ongoing construction on I-30 to drive through. That is a reasonable thing to think, and it is testable, because Vista West contains two quite different kinds of housing in the same place.
| Vista West, split by build era | Listings | Listings per address | Share that failed | Median days to contract |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Resale stock, built before 2015 | 100 | 1.19 | 26.0% | 36 |
| New stock, built 2015 or later | 544 | 2.41 | 78.1% | 94 |
Everything about the location is held constant in that table. Same subdivision, same school district, same commute, same retail, same construction on I-30. The only thing that differs is whether the house is an ordinary resale or builder inventory.
The resale houses fail at 26.0%, carry 1.19 listings per address, and go under contract in a median 36 days — faster than Wedgwood, faster than Arlington market-wide, and faster than every new-construction market I measure. If the location were suppressing demand, those houses would show it. They do not.
So the headline failure rate is a listing practice. What location may well explain is something narrower and more interesting: the new stock here takes 94 days to contract against 59 days in comparable new subdivisions further north. That 35-day difference is real, and absorption rates for new inventory are exactly the kind of thing local conditions influence. My data cannot separate the causes of it, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
Three things, and all of them matter on a Vista West assignment.
Days on market is close to meaningless here. A house showing a long cumulative count may have been re-listed repeatedly as builder inventory rather than sitting unwanted. A house showing a short count may be on its fourth listing. Neither figure describes marketing time the way it would in a resale neighbourhood.
The failure statistics cannot be used as evidence of market weakness. If a report leaned on a 70% listing failure rate to justify a downward adjustment or a long exposure time, it would be drawing a conclusion from a listing practice. Measured by address rather than by listing, the failure rate is 39.7% — still high, but a different number and a different story, and even that is inflated by homes built in 2025 and 2026 that have not had time to sell.
And the comparable sales are mostly builder transactions. 75.1% of Vista West sales closed with a seller-paid amount. Those prices need bringing to a cash-equivalent basis before they can be compared with anything, which is the subject of what the sticker price hides.
This neighbourhood is the clearest illustration in my whole dataset of why listing-level statistics mislead, which is the argument running through why houses don’t sell. The gap between the listing rate and the property rate is usually ten to eighteen points. Here it is thirty.
| Living area | Sales | Median $/sf |
|---|---|---|
| Under 1,600 sf | 71 | $243 |
| 1,600–2,000 sf | 59 | $193 |
| 2,000–2,600 sf | 35 | $154 |
| 2,600 sf and above | 28 | $119 |
From $243 per square foot to $119 — the rate halves across the size range. Wedgwood falls 26% and Candleridge 17%; Vista West falls 51%.
That is what a builder price sheet looks like when it is read as market data. The base house carries the lot, the permits and the fixed costs in a small footprint, and each additional square foot is priced near marginal cost. A per-foot rate taken from any one Vista West comparable and applied to a differently sized subject will be wrong by a large multiple, and here the error would be enormous.
On 193 closed sales across four size bands, these figures describe the shape of the market rather than supporting a value on their own.
If this is an estate or a date-of-death valuation, the retrospective search has to separate resale transactions from builder transactions, and the exposure time has to come from the resale stock rather than from the listing record as a whole.
If this is a divorce, the same point matters more, because a buyout has no market test. A value built on concession-inflated builder prices overstates what the house would command between two ordinary parties.
If this is a tax protest, the listing history is not the argument. The argument is cash equivalency and the size curve.
If you are selling a resale house here, the headline failure rate is not about you. Your competition is a builder with an incentive budget, and that is a pricing problem rather than a demand problem.
Complex property
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Because most of them are not ordinary resale listings. Across 644 resolved listings, 518 were placed by a single production builder and 78.4% of that builder’s listings ended in expiry, cancellation or withdrawal as inventory, pricing and incentives changed. The 644 listings sit on only 310 addresses — 2.08 listings per address, against 1.23 in Arlington. The mid-2000s resale stock fails at a normal 10 to 33%.
The data does not support that reading. The 70% listing failure rate is a listing practice rather than a demand signal: measured by address it falls to 39.7%, and even that is inflated by houses built in 2025 and 2026 that have not had time to sell. The genuine resale transactions behave normally.
$330,000 across 193 closed sales over three years, at a median $197 per square foot, on a median 1,775 square feet and a median lot of 5,793 square feet. Note that 193 sales is a modest sample and most of those transactions are builder sales rather than resales, so the figures describe the shape of the market rather than supporting a value on their own.
From $243 per square foot under 1,600 square feet to $119 above 2,600 — the rate roughly halves, against a 26% fall in Wedgwood. That is characteristic of builder pricing: the base house carries the lot and the fixed costs in a small footprint and additional square footage is priced closer to marginal cost. A per-foot rate taken from one comparable and applied to a differently sized house would be wrong by a wide margin here.
Very little. A long cumulative count may reflect inventory being re-listed repeatedly rather than a house nobody wanted, and a short count may be the fourth listing on the same address. Marketing time here has to be taken from the resale transactions rather than from the listing record as a whole.
It depends on the property and the assignment. I quote a written fee and a firm delivery date before any work begins, usually within one business hour, and the fee is never contingent on the value reported.
Written fee quote, typically within one business hour. Send the address and the reason you need the value — estate, divorce, tax protest, pre-listing — and I will confirm the fee and a delivery date before any work starts.
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