Farmersville, Texas turned over about 52% of its investor-owned property in the last twelve months. Columbus, Ohio turned over about 18%.
Half a market changing hands in a year versus less than a fifth. If you are deciding where to spend the next three months, that gap matters more than almost anything else you could look up.
Farmersville turned over about 52% of its investor-held property in a year; Columbus about 18%.
Turnover versus pace: two different questions
There are two ways to ask "is this market moving," and they answer different things.
Turnover is purchases in the last twelve months divided by investor-held properties. It tells you what fraction of the market changed hands — how liquid it is right now.
Pace compares the last twelve months to the twelve before. It tells you the direction — whether activity is building or fading.
A market can score high on one and low on the other. Celina turned over about 40% of its stock last year, which is high, but its pace ratio is about 0.97 — essentially flat against the prior year. Lots of activity, no acceleration.
Wylie is the reverse kind of signal: about 36% turnover, but a pace ratio near 1.91. It nearly doubled its purchase volume year over year. That is a market heating up.
Where the money is moving fastest
By turnover, the Collin County boom towns dominate.
Farmersville leads at about 52%, then Lavon at 46%, Princeton 44%, McKinney 42%, Celina 40%. In each case, a huge share of investor-held property traded within a single year.
That is what a construction market looks like from the data side. Builders buy a lot, put a house on it, and sell. The property does not sit in a portfolio for a decade, so turnover runs high by design.
Durham, North Carolina is the outlier from a different direction: about 50% turnover with a pace ratio near 2.29, the sharpest acceleration in our coverage. Durham is not a construction market — it reports no new construction share at all — so its turnover is coming from something else.
That is worth saying plainly rather than guessing at: the data shows Durham moving fast and does not explain why. A high number is a reason to look closer, not a conclusion.
Where it is slow, and what that means
At the other end: Grand Prairie at about 16%, Aurora at 16%, Columbus at 18%, Little Elm at 18%.
Slow turnover is not the same as a dead market. Columbus holds about 43,217 investor-owned properties — an enormous pool. Those investors still own property, still rent it, still make decisions. What low turnover says is that they are holding rather than trading.
For a wholesaler, that distinction is the whole thing. A market where investors buy and hold for years has fewer transactions available to you, regardless of how much property is there. The pool is not the opportunity. The flow is.
Columbus makes this concrete: about 43,217 properties held, but a pace ratio near 0.41, meaning purchases fell to well under half the prior year's. Large, slow, and slowing.
The number that catches people out
Here is the specific mistake this prevents.
You look at two cities. Columbus has about 43,217 investor-owned properties. McKinney has about 10,910. Columbus is four times the market, so you work Columbus.
But McKinney turned over about 42% of its stock last year against Columbus's 18%, and McKinney's pace ratio is about 1.27 against Columbus's 0.41. One market is accelerating into a high-turnover year; the other is decelerating in a low-turnover one.
The headline number pointed you at the wrong city. The flow numbers were right there.
The old-housing cities are moving too
It would be easy to read all this as "the new-build towns are hot and everywhere else is asleep." The data does not support that.
Garland turned over about 30% of its investor-held property last year with a pace ratio near 1.75 — a strong acceleration in a city where 58% of investor-owned stock predates 1980 and new construction is about 1%.
Mesquite shows the same shape: about 25% turnover, pace near 1.53, median year built 1987.
These are rehab markets speeding up, not construction markets. The buyers there are doing completely different work from the ones in Lavon, and they are doing more of it than they were a year ago.
So the useful framing is not new-build versus old. It is fast versus slow, asked separately for each kind of market, because a fast rehab market and a fast construction market both exist and they need different deals.
What turnover does not tell you
It does not say who is buying. A city can turn over quickly because one large entity assembled a position or because dozens of small buyers traded. Those are different outreach problems.
Small markets exaggerate. Farmersville holds about 1,948 investor properties. At that size, a few hundred transactions swing the percentage hard. A high rate on a small base is real but fragile.
It is backward-looking. Twelve months of completed purchases describes what happened. In a market that turned recently, the trailing figure lags.
The three-step check
Turnover first. Purchases over properties held. Under about 20% is a holding market; over about 40% is a trading one.
Then pace. Last twelve months against the twelve before. Above 1.0 is building, below is fading.
Then size. A 50% turnover on 2,000 properties and a 20% turnover on 43,000 are different opportunities, and neither is automatically better.
It takes about a minute per city, and the three numbers together are far more honest than any one of them. A big pool with falling flow is a mature market. A small pool with rising flow is an emerging one. Either can be worth working — but you should know which you have picked.
Read all three and a city tells you what kind of work it will be. Read only the first — or worse, only the property count — and you can spend a quarter in a market that was never going to give you transactions.
