Price of houses and rents in the San Antonio, Texas, area continue to move upward even while sales volume has pulled back in the in the region.

Whether you're a renter or a buyer, you'll pay more for your house this time of year than you did last year. That's according to stats from the San Antonio Chamber of Commerce.

The city added more than 15-thousand jobs in the last 12 months, taking its unemployment rate to about 4 percent for September 2007 -- near it's all time low of 3.5 percent just a few months earlier.

On the housing front, except for a dip in the third quarter of 2006, prices have continued to increase steadily since 2004.

In that year, the average price of a single-family home was about $123,000. Now, it stands at nearly $155,000 -- 26 percent more than just three years ago. Housing prices have increased by nearly 6 percent in the last 12 months for San Antonians.

The city stands to benefit from the Texas economy as a whole, according to Bernard Weinstein, a University of North Texas economist -- who is Quoted in the Dallas Morning News, saying: "From an economic perspective, the best place to be in the United States in 2008 is Texas."

Published: January 25, 2008

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Mr. Carr is an award-winning real estate broker in Northern Virginia and authored "Real Estate Investing Made Simple: a commonsense approach to building wealth." He also contributed to Donald Trump’s book, "The Best Real Estate Advice I Ever Received," and is an active trainer and coach of top producers in the Washington DC market. As a sought-after expert on real estate, Mr. Carr has been featured on CNN, various broadcast outlets and was the former real estate editor for The Washington Times. He accepts questions at his blog www.RealEstateOlogy.org.