Austin Real Estate Blog

Neighborhood prices for the first half of 2007 are out. So what is going on? For the most part, prices are up. Here is a link to all the stats: Austin Neighborhood Stats. I want to go through a little of how to look through the stats. There are 3 numbers to look at: the Average Sold Price, SqFt Price, and Median Sold Price. Basically when looking at the neighborhoods, I generally look at all 3 together as an indication as to what is happening. For example, if the SqFt Price is real low, it is possible that just a lot of larger houses sold those 6 months as opposed to the last time. Or if you look at Cat Mountain for the first half of 2007, the Average Sold Price went down, but the Median Price was higher. Since all 3 numbers did not fall, it is likely that a cheaper house or fixer-upper brought down the Average Sales Price. Basically, you have to look at all 3 numbers to be sure there is a change in trend, and in addition, we see if the trend continues for more than 6 months.

Another thing to look at is the Number of Houses Sold. If there are not many houses, the prices are probably not very accurate. For instance, the price almost doubled for the median prices in Enfield from the last half of 2006. But then looking at the statistics, we see only 5 houses sold, so there is a large margin of error.

All in all, we looked at 23 neighborhoods. Most of these neighborhoods are all in the central Austin area. The median prices were up in 20 of those neighborhoods compared to last year. So it looks like the central Austin Real Estate market is still doing well.