Austin Real Estate Blog

The November stats for the Austin Real Estate market are out. So what are we seeing for November. Compared to last year the number of home sales is up 6 percent. The number of listings is up 3 percent. The median price for an Austin Home is up 3 percent. The number of pending properties is up 14 percent. So overall we are seeing a larger market compared to last year.

Here is a graph showing the change in average and median price.

One interesting stat is months of inventory on the market. Generally 6 months of inventory is considered healthy. Anything less than 6 months is considered a strong market. In November of 2005 we had 3.98 months of inventory on the market. If we look at the months of inventory in November of 2006 we had 3.87 months of inventory. So overall Austin continues to enjoy a strong real estate market unlike the markets in California and Florida which have weakened considerably over the last year.

Here is a graph that has the months of inventory on the market in Austin for the last 3 years.

There is a bit of delay in when market stats are released by the Austin board of Realtors. So I wanted to talk a little about what is happening currently. Right now the supply on the market has tightened considerably. We typically see this around this time of year but it seems more pronounced this year. As of today there are only 6573 houses on the market. In December of 2005 we had 6873 and in January of 2006 we had 7143. Considering that the size of the market has increased having 6573 houses on the market seems rather low.

I expect some more houses to come on the market as people finish the holidays up. Generally people don't like to have properties on market during the holidays when out of town family and friends are visiting. Additionally a lot of remodelers fix up houses during the winter and then put the finished houses on the market in February through April.