December home price spike!

An article appeared in the Austin Business Journal earlier this week indicating that Austin-area home values remained soft late last year (Austin home prices still falling).  That was true through November, but there was a significant recovery in average and median prices in December!

More details are available at www.AustinMarketDashboard.com, but explaining this almost 10% month-to-month price increase is more difficult.  A similar change has happened only once in the past twenty years, in December 2001, as the U.S. economy was recovering from the obvious market disruptions that followed the WTC attacks on 9/11.  The market was disrupted again in 2009, with short-term effects resulting mostly from tax incentives for first-time home buyers.

I don’t know who originally said, “May you live in interesting times,” but we certainly have that honor now, don’t we?