Austin Real Estate Blog

The statistics for the Austin Real Estate market are out for March 2007. The number of sales is up and the number of houses on the market is down. Compared to March 2006 the number of sales was up from 2313 to 2343. The number of listings was down from 7811 last year to 7776 for March 2007.

One interesting statistic is the number of months of inventory on the market. This is arrived at by dividing the number of houses on the market by the number of houses sold in the last month. Generally any number below six shows a strong real estate market. Below is the months of inventory for March for the last 4 years.

2004 6.348
2005 4.296
2006 3.377
2007 3.319

As we can see 2004 was pretty slow. 2006 and 2007 have been better markets. In terms of months of inventory 2007 has been slightly better than 2006.

With the low months of inventory on the market one would expect to see prices rising which is exactly what we are seeing. The median price for an Austin Home climbed from 167,000 to 177,080. The average price for an Austin Home climbed from 231,775 to 243,213.

So what seems to be driving this growth? It seems people moving to Austin are actively picking their destination. By that I mean that we are not seeing alot of people that simply applied to a bunch of different jobs and just kind of ended up in Austin. Or people that were transferred to the Austin campus. We have had a decent number of writers and people that travel frequently enough with their jobs that the company allows them to pick their home city. There are also a number of people that are independently wealthy and are able to choose where to live. So its not so much a particular industry as the fact that Austin is simply a desirable place to live. Since these people have high discretionary incomes this is not a bad thing for the Austin economy.

So as we have been seeing the real estate market is stronger in central Austin compared to Austin as a whole. The number of properties on the market in central Austin went from 1287 last year to 1149 this year.

For central Austin Real Estate the months of supply on the market was at 2.14. That is pretty insanely low. Below is a breakdown of the different mls areas in central Austin.

Area 10 is currently pretty hot. As prices for houses in areas 6 and 7 have gone up people have started looking more and more in area 10. With the new mls maps area 10 was broken into areas 10N and 10S. Also area 3 around the Mueller airport is seeing some activity. Its an interesting area. For people that don't want to buy a expensive house on a tiny lot in the Mueller development they can buy a house for quite a bit less a few blocks over and still enjoy the amenties of the new Mueller development.