Stagnant market continues

Following up on Home sales up, Prices down (May 20, 2026), I offer the latest market data for the Austin metro area, as presented by my Market Dashboard. I’ll briefly discuss some details, but read to the end for my conclusion and expectations.

As a start, this long-term chart emphasizes how very different recent years have been compared to more than 30 years of previous experience:

The green dotted line is the Months’ Supply metric — how long active listing inventory would last if the current pace of sales were to continue. That metric obviously varies across the spans of multiple market cycles we’ve seen since 1990, but never was it as volatile as the last several years, dipping as low as 2 weeks’ supply in 2021 and 2022 and then growing to six months’ supply in 2025 and 2026.

The orange line shows the number of active listing soaring from about 1,000 in 2022 to 15,000 in 2025 and 2026!

Compare that explosion of inventory to the number of actual closed sales in 2022 through 2026 (YTD):

These conditions historically would have been a boom time for buyers, but the behavior of home sale prices caused sellers to cling to high prices at the same time that buyers were cautious about paying too much and borrowing at much higher interest rates:

I have been watching and waiting for evidence of an upward trend in sale prices, and we have indeed seen such trends at the beginning of each of the last four years, but one last chart filters out that seasonality and makes it clear how little progress we’ve actually made:

Using 12-month moving averages, you can see that the number of homes sold has been essentially flat for the last three years, about 30% below the peak in 2021. Over the same period, Median prices have trended downward and Average prices have levelled, both well below their peaks in 2022.

Put all that together with the current economic uncertainties and election year politics, and it seems unlikely that we’ll see significant changes in the coming months. I would love to be wrong about this forecast, but I’ll keep watching and reporting.