Austin Real Estate Blog

The statistics are out for July for the Austin real estate market. So let's go through everything.

Prices are up seven percent from this time last year. The median price went from 178,000 to 190,000. So while prices are dropping in most of the country, prices are doing well in the Austin Real Estate market.

Inventory has gone up quite a bit compared to a year ago. We currently have 9451 houses on the market compared to 8368 this time last year. While I always like to see less inventory on the market we still have pretty strong numbers. Generally if a market has less than 6 months of inventory on the market, it's considered strong. Currently we have 3.57 months of inventory on the market. Last year at this time we had a ridiculously low 3.09 months of inventory on the market. By comparison, last I checked, Phoenix had 11.57 months of inventory on the market. Which indicates the Phoenix market is having some trouble.

But why did it increase from last year? Basically we had a lot of builders in the suburbs building cheap homes for people with less than stellar credit. Now lenders are changing their lending practices. And voila, now those people can't get loans. This of course makes it harder to sell those homes. If we look at the numbers, we saw a total increase in inventory of 1083 homes. If we break this down, we saw an increase of 1050 in outer Austin and an increase in inventory of 33 homes in central Austin. So this is an increase of inventory in the suburbs of 15 percent compared to an increase of 2 percent for central Austin.

Another way to look at the difference between central and outer Austin is to look at months of inventory on the market:
All.........Outer Austin.......Inner Austin
3.57......3.91..................2.48

So in summary, the numbers for the Austin market are better than what we see in an average market (6 months of inventory) but we have slowed down a bit from the fasted paced market that we saw last year. Also we are seeing central Austin again outperform the suburbs.

Here are the stats per MLS area for central Austin:
(Here is a map of the MLS areas)

Ok so that's the basic market. If you want to keep reading I'm going to analyze the different MLS areas in the central Austin market. I like doing stuff like that because I'm a dork.

Ok, here we go. So when I started looking through the different MLS areas I was surprised there was more inventory because a lot of the different central Austin MLS areas saw inventory decreases. That was until I got to area 5. Area 5 saw an increase of 77 homes compared to last year. It looks like a lot of people are putting stuff on the market at inflated prices and it's not selling. There are also a lot of new builds in area 5.

Area 10N is still really hot. The months of inventory on the market is currently .92. There are 33 houses on the market and 37 houses sold in July. Basically high prices in area 6 and 7 are pushing people south of Ben White. 10S which is just south of 10N is also doing pretty well.

1N is doing well. It's not very central but it offers some of the larger houses close to central Austin. We are also seeing some strength in area 2.

Below I have a breakdown for all the central Austin MLS areas along with the current months of inventory for July 2006 and July 2007:

If you want to look at stats for the last few years they are located here Austin Real Estate Statistics also if you want to look at houses currently on the market you can search over here Austin MLS search

I'm going to bed.