What’s happening to Austin home values, the news media is saying that they’re dropping, but our local stats are showing something different. So in this Market Minute, I’m going to break down what we’re actually seeing here in the local market so that you can make the best decision going forward on whether or not it’s the right time for you to buy or sell.
So if we dive into the market stats for the month of April, we can see that the median price and Travis County, which includes the Greater Austin area, went up to $537,000. Now the media is focused on the fact that this is down 13%, from where it was last year. So you’ll see headlines about the Austin home values dropping, dropping higher than other cities. And it makes it sound like it’s happening in present tense. But if you look at month to month, we’re actually seeing an increase since January, our prices have gone up about 7%.
Now, we’re definitely not going to catch up to where we were last year. But the fact that prices are going up again, is showing signs that we are still in a healthy market, there’s a lot of buyer demand a lot of buyers that were sitting on the sidelines that are just waiting to get back in the game. Interest rates were kind of stable for a while and they were staying around 6%. So we did see a lot of buyers get back into the market. Now in this past week, interest rates went up to 7% in some cases a little higher depending on your credit score.
So again, headline news is that mortgage applications have declined since that big spike. Now part of the reason for this bike is that the Fed is going to be meeting again in June, and a lot of mortgage companies will kind of bump up the rate in preparation for whatever the announcements going to be. Once they make their decision, then rates usually adjust back a little bit downward.
There’s also some fear right now with the debt ceiling crisis and just uncertainty that’s causing some buyers to take a pause from their house hunting. But if you are in a position where you have steady employment, and you can still afford a home that you love, then you can definitely take advantage of the fact that our values are down from where they were last year. Now if your seller days on market on average is about 56 days.
So definitely expect that it’s going to take a little bit longer than what you might have been used to the last couple of years to sell your home. We’re not seeing crazy multiple offers. And we’ve had several multiple offers where we’ve won and we were actually below asking or just right at asking price. So don’t expect people to be paying way through the roof on a home if there’s multiple offers, but you can still get a really good value.
And what you have to keep in mind is that even though our prices dipped from where they were at the height of the market in May, there’s still a huge amount of equity that homeowners have gained in the last few years. If we look at where we started in 2020, our median value was just around 350,000 or so. So to go up from 350 up to where we are now around that 537 mark is a huge amount of equity. It’s around 50% or so. Normal appreciation is about 5% year over year. So we just condensed about 10 years worth of appreciation into the short timeframe.
The people who are really doing amazing as sellers are people that have owned their home even longer. In some cases we’ve had owners who own their home outright, no mortgage, they’re able to cash out all that equity and then go buy a home that they love and pay cash for it while the prices are down a little bit and they have great bargaining power. Now again, every neighborhood every home every situation is completely unique. So if you want to analyze your situation on whether or not it’s the right time, contact us to book a quick appointment with us.
