2023: A quick recap

I’ll provide a more through review of the Austin-area residential market later this month, but at this point I have isolated activity involving only resale properties — houses, condominiums, and townhouses — in our 5-county metro area.

Here is one snapshot of the past 60 months, looking at sales prices and average time on the market for all homes that sold each month:

The changes over the past 20 months are dramatic! Average and median sale prices are down 21% and 17% respectively since their peaks in April 2022, and down 7% and 6% just since June 2023. We saw month-over-month price growth in the first half of 2023, but that trend reversed in the second half.

Days to Sell peaked at 70 days in February 2023, plummeted to 40 days in June and July, and ended the year back up to 64 days. Both of those peaks were higher than any time since the end of 2012, as the current, very long, market cycle began!

There have also been signficant changes in the volume of activity — the number of listings and sales, and our best measure of inventory — Months’ Supply:

The number of active listings peaked in Septembert 2022, fell rapidly for five months, spiked again to June 2023, then fell again, with inventory in December 2023 slightly below December 2022. Note that Months’ Supply was down in December 2023, even as Unit Sales were down, because the number of new listings was down substantially. A pause in new listings isn’t especially surprising in December, but the magnitude of change last month was unusual compared to other recent years.

Note on that chart that the number of homes sold (orange line) in January and December of 2023 was very nearly the same as those months in 2019 (pre-pandemic), but with the May 2023 peak lower than all of the Spring and Summer months of 2019.

My Market Dashboard will provide a more comprehensive view of the market in a few weeks, but focusing on resale activity is important because housing demand in the Austin area remains very strong, and home builders have struggled to keep up in recent years. As I have told you over the past couple of years, though, the short-term direction of our market environment remains uncertain.