Despite all the great news about our booming sales market in Austin, many of the sales are to investors and the result is an over-supplied rental market. Renters have never had it so good! In Austin TX you can rent a 4000+ square foot brand new home on a golf course for $2200 per month! Oh, and that comes with all the amenities including pool, and recreation facilities. The typical family homes however, 3 bdrm 2 baths with a double garage, about 1800 square feet, lease for between $1,100 and $1,200 on average. You pay between $150,000 and $180,000 to purchase one of these typical rental homes in an area with good schools.
Month: February 2006
Austin’s Booming Market
Here is another article from today’s Austin Statesman regarding Austin’s strong real estate market. What we really have happening in Austin at the moment is a set of markets within the market. In fact, there are certain neighborhoods within which homes are selling so fast we have to get our buyer’s offers in on day one or we are too late. Other areas are strong but not crazy. And we are starting to see plenty of over-optimistic sellers who think the market will respond to pricing that is too high. This article touches on these topics and more.
Austin Real Estate Market Continues Heating Up
Today’s Austin Statesman has several good real estate articles in the Business scection. I’m posting one below. The stories essentially state, among other things, that it’s becoming harder for buyers to find homes priced under $200,000 or close to downtown.
This is true to some extent, and we’ve certainly had our share of buyers miss out on multiple offer deals recently. But there are still plenty of homes out there at the moment, even as the supply dwindles. What is getting tougher is to find the best deals. Some of our buyers are having to write 3 to 5 offers before getting the home they want. Our job is to make sure they don’t get caught up in the frenzy of a bidding war and pay too much for the home while at the same time encouraging offers than can be competitive. Buyers who hesitate and do too much hand wringing may find that 6 months from now the homes they passed on look like a great deal that was missed. I’ll write more about the ins and outs of this soon, but for now, I think the article below is a pretty good one to read.
Las Vegas Real Estate Convention – Part 2
If you read my first post about mine and Sylvia’s arrival and first day in Las Vegas for the Keller Williams real estate convention, you know that we spent a lot of time waiting in big lines. The lines never did decrease but we acclimated, or were assimilated perhaps, to the drudgery involved in pedestrian mobility at … Read more
Blogging From Las Vegas Real Estate Convention
Sylvia and I arrived in Las Vegas last night for the Keller Williams real estate convention. Neither of us has been to Las Vegas in our 15 years of marriage, and we have no other reason to come here since we don’t drink, gamble or smoke. Since our arrival, we have spent more time standing in massive lines and waiting than we have in over 20 years living in Austin. I’m not joking.
First, we waited for our luggage at the airport – over an hour at the carousel. We were grateful that our bag finally appeared. Then we waited about another hour in a long serpentine line for a cab ride to our hotel. I’m not a time/motion expert, but it doesn’t take an urban planning engineer to see that the method employed to get people out of the airport and into cabs is extremely inefficient in Las Vegas, or at least it was on this night. It would work well to herd cattle into the backs of trucks, but it’s not the best way to move large numbers of people into cabs.
Austin city council passes moratorium on some residential projects
This is a followup to my blog article earlier this week regarding the possibility that Austin will impose certain construction and remodel limits in older neighborhoods.
I’m just going to reprint what appears in the Austin Statesman today …