Austin Metro and Texas – 1st Quarter 2023

Texas REALTORS® released our report this morning about the real estate market across the state during the 1st quarter of this year. Here’s the state-wide summary:

• The Texas housing market shifted toward a more balanced state between buyers and sellers.

• •An increase of inventory suggests that buyers in many markets may have more options to choose from. However, excluding 2020 and 2021, months of inventory—how long it would take to sell the existing supply of homes for sale at the current pace of sales—has never been this low in the first quarter of the year. Meaning that while the Texas market’s inventory is recovering, it is not at a historically normal level yet.

• • The increase in days homes spent on the market and decrease in closed sales could indicate that the pace of the market has moderated.

• • Mortgage rates may be contributing to fewer sales from the buying and selling sides. Mortgage rates are up 1.4% from a year ago, which may affect the size of the loan that many buyers can afford. Also, homeowners who don’t have to move may be reluctant to sell if their existing mortgage is several percentage points lower than current mortgage rates.

• • The median home price in Texas increased by 0.6% in Q1 2023 compared to the same period last year, suggesting that there is still strong demand for housing in the state. In other words, the increase of inventory is not significant enough to outweigh the demand for housing in the Texas market.

These are the key statistics for our 5-county metropolitan area:

I’ll have more to say on this when I provide a quarterly update of my market dashboard, but you can see that the media price in the Austin metro was down 11.2% compared to the same period last year and that the number of closed sales was down almost 19%! The number of active listings soared by almost 400% and the time it took to sell and close was up 46 days — 60% longer than a year ago. Even with those inventory and sales figures, though, the Months of Inventory stat remains at half of what market economists have long considered “balance.” Technically, we remain in a seller’s market, disrupted by higher mortgage interest rates, recession concerns, and general economic concerns among many prospective home buyers.