investing in austin

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 [...]

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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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Mortgage Rates Plunge Below 5% – But Does it Help Investors?

November 26, 2008

From my Daily Realtor news feed: Mortgage rates declined Tuesday after the Federal Reserve said it would spend $600 billion to support the mortgage securities market. Rates fell to 4 7/8 percent, a 1 1/8 percentage point decline. David Beadle, president of BestInfo, said it was the sharpest one-day decline since 1988. “I hope that [...]

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Californians Own 10% of South Austin Rental Homes

July 4, 2008

I recently harvested thousands of tax records for marketing purposes. I pulled from the Travis County property tax records database all of the “absentee” owners of single family homes in South Austin, including area codes 78704, 78745, 78748, 78749, 78739 and 78736. An “absentee owner” is one for whom the mailing address is different than [...]

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