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Last summer I posted a look at the distribution of home sale prices in the Austin metropolitan area (Update: Austin home price distribution). That view of prices through the first half of 2023 showed how the imbalance of housing supply and demand drove prices higher in 2022, and that market forces were calming the environment in 2023. This chart updates that data through the end of 2023 and includes a longer view — the end of the Great Recession, the transition into the current market cycle, and the pandemic period with the pricing distortions: The upper portion of that graphic displays the p ..read more

For several months I haven’t provided a comprehensive update of the market metrics I track in my dashboard. I won’t have refined data from the Real Estate Research Center at Texas A&M for the whole first half of 2024 for a few more weeks, but this quick look will be useful: In case you haven’t seen this before, the top chart in that set shows the number of active listings each month, the number of listings sold each month, and how long that inventory would last if the current pace of sales continued. A 6-month supply of homes for sale is assumed to represent a “balanced” market, without a ..read more

I have commented here and in other messages that the Austin-area residential market remains more unpredictable than we have experienced for much of this very long market cycle. In the coming days, I’ll provide a complete update of my market dashboard with refined data from the Texas A&M Real Estate Research Center, but this post focuses on what most individual home sellers and buyers care about — the market for resale homes — using MLS data only. All of the charts below show this entire cycle (so far), from 2012 to Present. The first graph shows how many active resale listings we had in ea ..read more

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Central Texas Table of Grace is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that exists to provide emergency shelter services to the children and youth in the foster care system. Our mission is to create a loving, nurturing, homelike environment for displaced youth, providing shelter and healthy food as well as teaching healthy habits and life skills to the youth in our care. Ways to Help Thank you ..read more

Today is the first day of early voting in Texas, leading to the 2024 primary elections on May 5. Primaries are especially important in Texas because they are so early compared to many other states. It’s time to make your voice heard. Texas REALTORS® is committed to advocating for a strong real estate industry, advancing a culture of continued learning, and staying ahead of issues concerning members and their clients. That mission works to promote and defend private property rights, land use policies that allow adequate housing supply and diversity, property tax policies that serve owners of re ..read more

At the end of this post, I’ll add one chart to make an important point about home prices and home owners’ equity during this over-long market cycle. As background for that, my complete market dashboard appears below.  The important feature of the top chart (Market Activity) is the red circle, highlighting that between September 2020 and April 2022, more homes were sold than were listed acrose the 5-county Austin-Round Rock MSA. That extreme imbalance between supply and demand led to unprecedented inventory absorption shown in the second chart (Unit Sales/Listings), and that erosion of housing ..read more

I’ll provide a more through review of the Austin-area residential market later this month, but at this point I have isolated activity involving only resale properties — houses, condominiums, and townhouses — in our 5-county metro area. Here is one snapshot of the past 60 months, looking at sales prices and average time on the market for all homes that sold each month: The changes over the past 20 months are dramatic! Average and median sale prices are down 21% and 17% respectively since their peaks in April 2022, and down 7% and 6% just since June 2023. We saw month-over-month price growth in ..read more

In Mortgage interest rates forecast, I mentioned that forecasts for home sales and prices in the coming year are mixed. Economists can interpret the same data somewhat differently and draw their own conclusions, but an article today in REALTOR Magazine points out that different market areas may well see different results. The article begins: “After two years of sharp declines, existing-home sales are poised for improvement in 2024. But first, this slice of the housing market must weather the rest of a rocky year in 2023, with existing-home sales expected to end up 18% lower than those of 2022 ..read more