Austin area home sales shattered records in past decade

Anyone who has paid even passing attention to the Austin home-buying market in the past 10 years will know that prices have been on a steady increase. Still, it’s a little surprising to find out just how much that increase has been. According to a recent Austin Board of Realtors report, home sales prices in the area cost 84 percent more than they did in 2010.

For some individual perspective: Median home price for the Austin-Round Rock area in 2010 was $193,520. In 2019, it was $318,000 in 2019. In 2019 alone, there were a record-setting 33,084 home sales and more than $13 billion in sales volume, according to ABoR’s 2019 Central Texas Housing Report, released Thursday.

AVoR president Romeo Manzanilla attributed the leaps to Austin’s “unprecedented population growth during the past decade” and said “the market is not showing signs of slowing down anytime soon.” The report also notes that Austin is one of only eight U.S. metro areas to have fully recovered in the last 10 years to prerecession values—at least according to Mark Sprague, state director of information capital at Independence Title. Austin’s GDP, which grew 117 percent over the last 20 years, helped the real estate market recover from the recession,” he said. “The closest metro out of the top 50 in the US to see this type of growth was Silicon Valley, which grew its GDP by 99% during the same period.”

Austin city limits

Within Austin city limits, of course, the housing numbers were higher. The median home price for 2019 hit $395,000, or 5.3 percent over the previous year. During that period, there were 9,572 homes sold for revenue of around $4.7 million, the latter a 6.9 percent rise over last year.

In December, median home price increased to $405,093, a bump of 8 percent since the same month last year, and sales increased 8.9 percent year-over-year, to 738 homes sold. This despite the city’s chronically low inventory—it decreased in December from 0.5 months to 0.9 months of inventory—and the common wisdom that winter is a slow sales season.

County by county

While Austin was the city that saw the steepest home-price increases over the past decade, all the counties included in the broader metro area contributed to those whopping numbers. In addition, sales in Travis, Williamson, Hays, Caldwell, and Bastrop counties increased 9.2 percent increase across the region since December 2019.