Wedgwood

Wedgwood is southwest Fort Worth's postwar heartland — the area inside the 76133 ZIP code, about seven and a half miles from downtown. Brick ranch houses on quarter-acre lots, built mostly between 1955 and 1985, three bedrooms and a two-car garage, almost none of it under a homeowners association.

Most people say “Wedgwood” for all of it, but three names carry the volume. Over the three years ending September 2026, Wedgwood itself accounted for 478 closed sales, South Hills for 294 and Candleridge for 163 — about two-thirds of the market between them, with 55 more subdivisions making up the rest. Candleridge is worth separating out: built around 1979, a full decade newer than Wedgwood proper, with houses that run about 200 square feet larger and a median $22,500 higher.

The original neighborhood was developed between 1950 and 1970 by E. L. Baker, Irwin Krauss and S. G. Payte, and every early street was given a name starting with W so the houses would all tie back to Wedgwood — a convention eventually abandoned because it made life difficult for emergency dispatchers. That 1950-to-1970 window is why Candleridge, platted about a decade later, reads as a different market inside the same ZIP.

Often misspelled Wedgewood, including by a few agents who ought to know better. The neighborhood and the MLS both use Wedgwood.

Altogether this is the second-highest-volume housing market in Fort Worth — 1,474 closed sales over that window, across 58 subdivisions — more than any area in the city except Eagle Mountain, and more than twice what Ridglea and Crestwood produced combined.

I'm a Fort Worth broker and a Certified Residential Appraiser. What follows is what those sales actually show, including the part that isn't good news.

Start with the uncomfortable number

Controlling for house size, lot size and build year, values in 76133 are down 1.97% a year — and at p = 0.0002 on nearly 1,500 sales, that is not noise. It is one of the more solid declines I can measure anywhere in the city.

Median price per foot by year: $156, $165, $159, $158. Median close: $275,000, $285,000, $275,000, $284,000.

The medians look flat. The model says otherwise, and the model is right — because what sold in 2026 was slightly larger and slightly newer than what sold in 2023. Strip that out and the underlying value is falling. This is exactly the kind of thing a median hides, and it is why I run the numbers rather than quoting them.

Why it's falling, and why it isn't what you'd assume

The explanation people reach for is distance — that the market is soft out on the edges where the building is. Wedgwood is a problem for that theory. It sits seven and a half miles from downtown, comfortably inside Loop 820, in a part of town nobody would call the edge of the city. Nothing here was built by a production builder in the last decade.

So I tested it. Across the 21 Fort Worth ZIP codes inside nine miles, I compared each one's measured trend against its distance and against its price level:

Inside the loop, price is what predicts the trend, and distance does not.

Wedgwood's median is $280,000. It lands almost exactly where the price line predicts.

Which means the thing to look at is not the map. It is what else a buyer with this budget can get.

That is the honest shape of this market: the affordable half of close-in Fort Worth is losing value while the expensive half holds. It is happening three miles from neighborhoods that are perfectly flat. Ridglea, at $343,000, measures −0.1% and not significant. Arlington Heights, at $441,000, measures −0.07%. Wedgwood, at $280,000, measures −1.97% and solid.

The price correlation tells you where the decline is. It doesn't tell you why. For that, look a few miles south.

What Wedgwood is actually competing against

A Wedgwood house between 1,700 and 2,400 square feet — 665 sales, the core of this market — has a median close of $307,000. Median build year 1969.

Here is what the same size buys a short drive south, brand new:

Thirteen thousand dollars separates a 1969 house from a 2025 house of the same size. Not thirteen percent — thirteen thousand dollars, on a $307,000 purchase. That is a roof, a slab, a panel, supply lines and a set of mechanicals, all new, for about four percent more.

And there is a great deal of it. The 76036 ZIP alone closed 1,471 sales in three years, 87% of them built since 2020. Across the three areas south of here, better than two thousand newly built houses changed hands in the same window Wedgwood sold fourteen hundred.

That is the mechanism. Wedgwood is not competing against other fifty-year-old houses — it is competing against new construction that has drawn close enough in price to be a genuine alternative for the same buyer. Every year the gap narrows, the aging stock has to discount a little more to stay in the conversation.

It cuts the other way too, and this is the part the builder's sales office will not mention: 76140 is falling 4.68% a year and 76036 is falling 1.54%. The new houses are not holding value either. Wedgwood's decline of 1.97% is, in fact, the mildest of the four.

What it costs

• Median close $280,000 on 1,798 square feet — about $160 per foot
• Median lot 9,518 square feet; median build year 1969
• Median 26 days on market at 97.3% of original list
• Closed prices ran $85,000 to $840,000
• Three bedrooms, two-car garage, no pool in 9 of 10 houses

Twenty-six days and 97.3% of asking is a functioning market. Sellers here are not capitulating. 21% of sales close within a week; 17% take more than three months. The fast end is priced right on day one. The slow end is priced off what the house was worth in 2022.

Two things that make this the cheapest house to own in Fort Worth

The purchase price gets the attention. The carrying cost is where Wedgwood is genuinely unusual, and almost nobody puts it in the comparison.

The effective tax rate here runs about 1.93% — the lowest of any area I measure. North Fort Worth runs 2.11% to 2.24%, and several of those neighborhoods add a PID assessment on top that doesn't show up in the quoted rate. There is no MUD and no PID here. The infrastructure was paid for fifty years ago.

And 96% of these houses have no HOA at all. Only 60 of 1,474 sales reported a fee. Where one exists the median is $200 a month, and those are the exception.

Put those together against a comparable purchase further out and the gap is not small:

That's $265 a month before the mortgage is even discussed — roughly $3,200 a year, on houses that are not far apart in size. Whether that offsets a market falling 2% a year depends entirely on how long you hold, and that is a real calculation rather than a rhetorical one. On a five-year horizon it does not. On a twenty-year horizon it plainly does.

The neighborhoods

Look at the two ends of that per-foot column. Kellis Park sells at $198 a foot. Candleridge sells at $156. Kellis Park is not the better neighborhood — it is the neighborhood with 1,022-square-foot houses. Candleridge's are more than twice the size.

Run it across all 1,474 sales and a 1% increase in house size adds about 0.54% to the price. Square footage is worth roughly half what a per-foot multiplication implies, because a kitchen, a roof, a slab and a set of mechanicals don't scale with the size of the house.

Which means the mistake here goes both directions. Price a 2,200-foot Candleridge house off Kellis Park's $198 and it sits for five months. Price a 1,100-foot house off Candleridge's $156 and you hand money to the buyer. An automated valuation does not know the difference. It multiplies.

What else the sales say

Vintage carries real money. Each year of build date is worth about 0.22%, significant at p < 0.001 — so a 1985 house beats a 1952 house by roughly 8% with size, lot and location held constant. In a ZIP where the stock spans 1950 to 1989, that's a meaningful part of the price and the single most overlooked adjustment.

Lot size matters, and more than people expect for this price point. The lot coefficient runs 0.17 at p < 0.0001. Not Ridglea's land market, but not a rounding error either.

The school district line does not move the price. Most of 76133 is Fort Worth ISD, with 77 sales falling in Crowley ISD. Crowley carries a 2.8% premium — at p = 0.231, which is not significant. I'm reporting that because I've measured school premiums that were real elsewhere in this city — Keller ISD at +4.2% and Northwest at +3.3%, both highly significant. Here, the boundary isn't doing the work, and I'd rather publish the null than leave you thinking it is.

59% of sales carried seller-paid concessions. Budget for that as part of the plan, not as a failure.

What I look at in a Wedgwood house

• The slab, first. Fifty-to-seventy-year-old foundations on North Texas clay with mature trees pulling moisture out from under them. This is the single largest source of surprise cost here.
• Supply lines and the electrical panel. Original galvanized plumbing and undersized panels are common in the 1950s and 1960s stock, and neither shows up in listing photos. Ask what was replaced and when.
• Build year against the comparable set. A 1958 house and a 1985 house are both “Wedgwood ranch” in a spreadsheet and they are not worth the same. That's worth about 6% and it gets ignored constantly.
• House size against the comparable set. See above — comparables should be within a few hundred square feet, not within a few streets.
• What the renovation actually touched. New counters over original systems is a different asset from one where the expensive invisible work was done. Ask for permits, not photographs.
• Whether the tax figure on the listing is the seller's. On a long-held homesteaded house the Texas assessment cap comes off when it sells. The 1.93% is real; the dollar figure on the listing may not be yours.

What to have looked at, by the decade your house was built

This ZIP spans forty years of construction, and the era matters as much as the neighborhood does. Some things wear out on a clock. Others are simply a function of what was standard when the house went up — and those are worth knowing about before you're under contract, because they are invisible, expensive and entirely checkable.

Which means the two halves of this ZIP are different inspection conversations, and they fall along a line you can see in the subdivision names:

• Wilshire is 100% pre-1978. South Hills is 98%. Wedgwood proper is 94%. Galvanized-and-cast-iron territory.
• Candleridge is 61% built between 1978 and 1995. South Meadow is 59%. That's the polybutylene window.

Same ZIP code, same comparable set in most people's spreadsheets, and a completely different list of things to look at. A galvanized supply line corrodes closed from the inside and shows up as falling water pressure. Cast iron sewer deteriorates from the inside too, and the only way to know is a camera down the line — which costs a couple of hundred dollars and occasionally saves five figures. Polybutylene has a known history of fitting and pipe failures and is something inspectors flag on sight; it is worth asking your insurance agent about before you're committed.

Build year tells you what is likely, not what is there. Houses get repiped, panels get replaced, and sewer lines get lined — plenty have been. The point is knowing what to ask about and what to have looked at, not assuming the worst.

What's worth fixing first

Given what this housing stock is competing against, the question of how much to do before listing is sharper here than in most of the city.

Start with financeability, not appearance. A roof at the end of its life, a slab impaired badly enough, or an HVAC system that doesn't run can push a house out of mortgage eligibility entirely — and at that point you are selling to cash buyers, who expect to be paid for the privilege. That is where the largest discounts in this ZIP come from, and it is not a cosmetic problem.

Then the appraisal items: peeling exterior paint, rotted wood, brick deflection. FHA and VA appraisers call these out, and a called-out condition becomes a repair demand before closing whether you planned for it or not. On a 1969 house this is usually the highest-return money available.

Only then the presentation layer — paint, flooring, landscaping, fixtures. And kitchens and baths last, with a plan, because that is where the scopes get big and the losses get large.

I tested fourteen common improvements against 33,000 Fort Worth closings in what to fix before you list, and in what order. New roof measured at zero, which sounds discouraging until you understand what it means: a working roof isn't a feature buyers pay extra for, it is the condition they assume. You do it to stay in the market, not to get ahead of it.

If you're selling in Wedgwood

I'm not going to tell you this is a seller's market, because the data says it isn't. Values have moved down about 2% a year for three years running, and pricing to 2022 is the most expensive mistake available to you here.

What the data also says is that a correctly priced house in this ZIP sells in under a month at 97% of asking, and that one in five goes under contract inside a week. The market is functioning. It is just functioning at a level below where it was, and the sellers who accept that get out cleanly while the ones who don't spend five months finding out.

Practically: comparables from your own size and vintage band, not a ZIP-wide per-foot average. A list price set from the last six months rather than the last three years. And an honest accounting of the slab, the panel and the plumbing before a buyer's inspector does it for you, because in fifty-year-old housing stock that is where deals die.

If you're buying in Wedgwood

You are buying into the most affordable close-in housing in Fort Worth, with the lowest effective tax rate of any area I measure, no HOA, a quarter-acre lot and a seven-mile commute. Those things are real and they are not available in the new-construction ring at any price.

You are also buying into a market that has fallen three years running with no sign yet of turning. If your horizon is three years, take that seriously. If it's twenty, the carrying-cost advantage compounds in your favour and the entry price is the lowest it has been since 2022.

Both of those are true at once, and anyone who tells you only one of them is selling you something.

Buying or selling in Wedgwood

Fourteen hundred sales, fifty-eight subdivisions, a forty-dollar-a-foot spread that is mostly a size effect, a school district line that turns out not to matter, the cheapest carrying cost in the city, and a measured decline solid enough that I'd rather lead with it than bury it.

What I can tell you is what the closed sales on houses your size and your vintage actually support, how wide the range around that is, and what the property will cost you every month once the assessment resets.

Browse active listings in this price range, or call or text (682) 207-4310, or send me a note.

Wedgwood sits inside a city that is splitting along price rather than geography. My Fort Worth market report has the ZIP-by-ZIP numbers and the repeat-sale analysis behind that.

Figures are medians and model results from NTREIS closed sales in Fort Worth 76133 for the three years ending September 2026, reported in aggregate. School attendance boundaries, tax rates and market conditions change — confirm current figures for a specific address before relying on them.