Texans' starter homes

Axios Local readers across Texas told us about their first homes. Here's a sampling of what y'all said.

🫣 Curtis Dickinson bought his San Antonio home sight unseen 15 years ago while living in Massachusetts.

• "I am now a proud Texan," says Dickinson, who tells Axios he watched a walk-through of the property via CD.

📦 Sara Schorn recently ditched her Austin apartment for a three-bedroom house in Lockhart.

• "It's new construction but built in an established neighborhood, not one of the cul-de-sac cookie-cutter neighborhoods … The growth won't catch up to where I am for some time."

🏘️ Morgan Peters closed on a house in Houston's Energy Corridor area last spring.

• "After living in Montrose for seven-plus years, we really wanted to buy a roughly 2,000-square feet home in a neighborhood that had a suburban feel."

📈 Judy Kriehn bought a small two-bedroom in Garland in 1983, when the annual average mortgage rate topped 13%.

• "I was fortunate to qualify for a special rate of 10% offered for first time home buyers in certain neighborhoods."

🤑 Cody Dishman purchased a starter home in Cedar Park in 2009 for $160,000.

• "We took advantage of the Obama-era first-time homebuyer credit of $8,000, so we didn't have to pay much out of pocket."

🏚️ Lisa Stout bought her first home, a foreclosure in Spring, at an auction in 1986. "That is all we could afford at the time."

🛠️ Randy Case purchased a repossessed Austin home in 2004 for $80,000, fixed it up and lived there for 15 years.

• "The house was a wreck. The back door didn't lock, there were dead cockroaches and other dead bugs all over, and everything inside needed to be replaced."

Go deeper: Inside Biden's plan to unlock the housing market's golden handcuffs