investing in austin

Austin Real Estate Market – 2010 Breakdown by MLS Area

February 20, 2011

Below is a chart breaking down the 2010/2009 sales comparisons by MLS Area for the Austin real estate market. This time I’m adding a couple of new things. First, there is color coding on each of the summary rows for each area. A green shade indicates “improvement” in the measured metric. I put “improved” in [...]

1 comment Read the full article →

Austin Real Estate Market – Year 2010 Summary and 2011 Predictions

February 6, 2011

The Austin real estate market finished 2010 with increased overall sales prices. The market is roughly a bit higher than the peak 2007 values. See the graph below for an illustration of Austin home sales values from 1999 through 2010. The graph can be deceiving though. It simply represents the cumulative data from all MLS [...]

6 comments Read the full article →

Austin Real Estate Market Update – Aug 2010 Stats

September 16, 2010

The average year-to-date sold price for homes in Austin is $256K, which just broke through the (peak) year 2007 YTD of $255K. Now, there is a lot of discussion and caveats that must be considered along with this milestone statistic, but nevertheless, look at the graph below for a visual representation of where average and [...]

18 comments Read the full article →

Is Rental Property Investing in Austin Still Profitable?

May 30, 2010

As someone who’s bought and sold a bunch of rentals, and helped other investors buy, sell and manage investment property in Austin for a number of years, I’m about to ask a question that might seem counter to my professional mission of being in service to real estate investors. Is rental property investing in Austin [...]

12 comments Read the full article →

Tax Credit Effect on Austin Real Estate Market

May 16, 2010

The $8,000 buyer tax credit ended April 30, 2010. Take a look at the following graph to see the effect the tax credit had on buyer activity in Austin TX.  This shows Pending activity for Austin MLS listings going back to Jan 2005 through April 2010. The green line is 2010. The previous years of [...]

11 comments Read the full article →

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 [...]

4 comments Read the full article →

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 [...]

5 comments Read the full article →

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 [...]

3 comments Read the full article →

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 [...]

0 comments Read the full article →

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 [...]

5 comments Read the full article →

← Previous Entries