Austin Real Estate Blog

The January stats are out for the Austin real estate market. As has been the case for the last several months, the Austin market is slower than it was last year. Compared to this time last year, inventory is up 24%. Home sales are down 10%.

Overall the market seems to be doing about the same. The market doesn’t seem to be getting better or worse over the last few months. The decrease in sales (10%) compared to last year was the lowest year to year decrease since this summer, which is a positive sign. But overall I think we are still clearly in a buyers market. Below is a breakout of the statistics for the last few years.

Next let's look at the submarkets for Austin. The trends we have been seeing remain the same. The East Austin real estate market continues to have a lot of inventory on the market since the California investors left the market. The suburbs are also doing worse than the general market. West Central Austin is outperforming the general market.

For more stats here is a breakdown of the central Austin MLS areas. (Here is map of Austin showing the location of the different MLS areas

I have been getting a lot of questions about the Austin condo market. Below is a chart of sales for the last 2 years. Basically the amount of inventory on the market has increased but sales have not. In January 2006 we had 131 sales and 955 Active Listings. In January 2008 we had 121 sales so about the same as 2 years ago, but we had 1676 condos on the market. So it looks like central Austin is outperforming the suburbs and houses are outperforming condos.

I wrote a question and answer section for Decembers Austin real estate blog. Most of these points remain the same. The most important is I still think it's a bad time to flip because the market is slow and it's hard to flip profitably if it takes 6 months to sell a property. I also think it's a good time to buy and hold because buyers can buy homes and investment properties for less and interest rates are low. In 10 years people are generally happy when they buy in a down market.

As always if anyone has a question about a particular property please feel free to contact us. Also in addition to all the stats if you are interested in looking at homes currently on the market you can use our search of the Austin MLS.