Market Dashboard and Case-Shiller Index

It has been about six weeks since I wrote that home prices in the Austin area had been rising through May 2024, but I pointed out that the trend remained unpredictable at that time (Resale Market Changes – What a ride!). What we see in my market dashboard, now including results from June bears that out:

The red circle in the top chart above highlights the period during 2020 – 2022 when the number of homes sold each month exceeded the number of homes listed for sale, and you can see that “months’ supply” dropped to one month or less for many months. That upside-down spike in activity is clearly visible in the second chart as well, and the impact of that situation on prices is quite visible in the third chart.

In the second and third charts I have circled the May-to-June downturn in the ratio of sales to listings and the corresponding drop in home prices month-to-month.

Coincidentally, as I was preparing to write this post I received this month’s update on the S&P Case-Shiller Home Price Indices, summarized here:

That graph shows that S&P’s National, 10-City, and 20-City indices experienced the pandemic-era price peak at very nearly the same time as we did in the Austin metro area, but the magnitude of that spike in our area was much greater than the S&P figures. Even more important, note that the S&P price indices fully recovered by mid-2023, but the median prices in the Austin metro in June 2024 were still 18% below that 2022 peak in June 2024!

In Central Texas, we have now seen two months of modest price erosion since April. The Case-Shiller indices, on the other hand, showed slight growth from April to May. It will be interesting to see how these trends develop in the coming months. There is no doubt that our market environment in the Austin area was badly overheated in 2022 and a sharper turn back toward “normal” is not too surprising, but the same issues — growing housing inventories and rising mortgage interest rates, along with broader economic and political uncertainties — are present in virtually all large U.S. metros.

Stay tuned for updates on these numbers as we move toward Fall and the start of school years across the country.