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investing in austin

Austin Real Estate Market Update – Nov 2009

January 5, 2010

Maybe I should start terming my Austin real estate market update blogs “Austin Real Estate Market, as Influenced by the Federal Government”. Indeed, the word “market” does need an asterisk next to it for the Sept-Nov time frame in Austin. Instead of taking its natural course, whatever that might have been, the lower end of [...]

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Austin Rental Market Update – Oct 2009

November 22, 2009

The rental market for houses in Austin is still slowly improving, climbing out of the huge dip we took after the tech bust and 9/11. For October 2009, average and median rents are both up about 1%, but homes are taking longer to rent, averaging 42 days on market compared to 38 a year ago [...]

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Investing in Small Commercial vs. Residential Real Estate

November 8, 2009

One of my commercial tenants skipped out on me earlier this year, so I have my office building on Manchaca Rd. for rent again. I knew it could possibly take 6 to 12 months to find a new tenant, and so far, even after dropping the rent from $1,700 to $1,495, I still don’t have [...]

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Austin Real Estate Market Update for August 2009 Sales

September 17, 2009

Austin Real Estate values for August 2009 are down about 5% from the same month last year. Average sales prices for the 1,657 houses that sold are down 5.12%. Median sold prices are down 4.80%. The number of houses sold is down 15% from August 2008, which is less of a decrease than we’ve seen [...]

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Rental Moveout Walk-through in South Austin

September 2, 2009

Yesterday, September 1st, I walked through a rental property in South Austin that had been vacated the day before. I had my Flip Mino Video Camera with me so I decided to make a short video of the walk-through and share a few things about what I look for when walking a vacant rental property [...]

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Austin Real Estate Market Update – July 2009 Stats

August 26, 2009

It’s getting real hard to write about the Austin real estate market when month after month it just keeps doing what is expected, treading water overall, doing well under $200K, especially close in, and still soft in the $400K+ price ranges. That really sums it up, month after month. At the beginning of the year [...]

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Austin Real Estate Investing – Then and Now

May 2, 2009

Since the end of WWII, rent prices in the U.S. have run parallel to relative sales prices consistently over time. By this I mean that a $60K home would normally rent for about $600 per month, or 1% of its sales value. The chart below illustrates the gap in sale to rent value ratios that has [...]

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Austin Rental Market Update – March 2009

April 28, 2009

Average rents in Austin have taken a slight dip for the first quarter of 2009. The number of rented homes is up 11% over the same three months a year ago, no doubt due to the fact that many sellers are opting to rent instead of dropping prices below their bottom dollar. This creates additional [...]

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Austin Real Estate Networking Club

February 18, 2009

Tomorrow (Thusday Feb 19) I’ll be giving the stats presentation for the monthly Austin Real Estate Networking Club. Each month a different Realtor is invited to provide a real estate overview of the Austin market, and I’ll be up this month and March also.
But that’s not why I want to encourage and invite you to [...]

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Austin Real Estate Market Outlook for 2009

January 7, 2009

Well, 2008 is behind us and it seems like every Realtor in Austin except me and Sylvia are saying “good riddance”. For reasons I won’t fully go into in this blog post, Sylvia and I actually did better in 2008 than in 2007, by almost every measure. It was another record year for us, which [...]

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