The Austin real estate market 2025 data shows the market is still recalibrating in April. Here’s a One Chart, One Take on the Austin real estate market. I’m starting with my favorite chart, the one that I use to provide context to buyers and sellers on how to think about real estate appreciation and values across time.
Table of Contents
The Chart: 10-Year Austin Market Analysis
Below is a 10-year lookback on the median sold value of single family homes in Travis, Williamson, and Hays Counties (Austin Metro) from January 2015 through April 30, 2025. It excludes new homes, condos, and duplexes because those skew and distort the resale market stats for single-family homes (regular houses).
The red line is the trend line for where values were heading had the 6.45% annual appreciation rate of Jan 2015 through Dec 2019 remained steady before the COVID spike intervened.
Austin Real Estate Market 2025: Homes Are Still Overpriced
If the 2015–2019 appreciation trend of 6.45% had continued, the April 2025 median would be $433,070, or about $61,930 less than the actual median value for April 2025 of $495,000. The Austin real estate market is still about 8% overvalued if that 6.45% annual appreciation trendline from Jan 2015 through Dec 2019 had held.
But wait! 6.45% is not the historic average annual appreciation for the Austin real estate market. It’s actually 4.5% to 5%. Texas home values have appreciated at roughly 4.5% to 5% annually on average since the 1950s, with ~4.75% being a reasonable midpoint. Decades of data from sources like the FHFA House Price Index and Texas A&M Real Estate Center confirm this, and it holds for all major metros in Texas.
Had COVID never happened AND the time period between Jan 2020 and April 2025 had simply reverted back to the historic average appreciation of 4.75% for Jan 2020 through April 2025, the median home would be around $397,180 today instead of $495,000. That’s a $97,820 difference, meaning current prices are about 25% above where historical trends suggest they should be.
Regression to the Mean
What’s happening right now might feel contradictory. On one hand, I’m showing data that says the market is still overpriced. On the other hand, homes are still selling. And they’re not closing at deep discounts, just around 8% below their original list price on average. So how can both things be true?
The key is this: regression to the mean isn’t a crash—it’s a slow drift back to a trend line.
What we’re seeing is the natural unwinding of an overheated market. After the COVID spike, prices didn’t snap back to trend line levels overnight. Instead, they’ve been gradually correcting downward while time keeps marching forward, and the trend line keeps rising with it.
The result? The gap between actual values and trend values is shrinking:
- In early 2022, the market was 53% overvalued
- By early 2023, that dropped to 26%
- In 2024: 19%
- 2025: 8% overvalued (using the pre-COVID trend) or 25% overvalued (using historical averages)
This slow convergence is what makes today’s market feel weird. And there are interest rate headwinds as well as general affordability and buyer hesitancy issues operating in the market as well.
Yes, homes are still “too expensive”, but that doesn’t mean buyers will stop buying entirely. People have to have a place to live, serious buyers who need to will still buy, even in a still inflated market. And serious sellers who must sell, will meet those buyers at prices both can live with.
What the Texas A&M Real Estate data tells us
The 26-year data from the Texas A&M Real Estate Center supports what I said earlier about the annual appreciation rate generally leveling out over decades to about 4.5 to 5%. This graph, averaged out, represents an average annual appreciation of 4.58% for Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos from 1999-2025. This confirms our analysis that current prices are still above historical norms. Market will always want to regress to the historic norms.
It’s not super perceptible on any of these charts but I think that starting in year 2000 the Austin real estate market was due for a breather. You can see the steeper incline from starting around 2012 when we came out of the banking crises slowdown. That was a pretty good 8 year run. But then the pandemic created the hyper spike in home values which was perhaps more pronounced in Austin than in any other US city.
For Buyers:
Don’t expect a price collapse in the Austin real estate market 2025, but do expect patience to pay off. Price corrections are still underway, but they’re happening in slow motion. If you’re buying now, prioritize value, not timing. Avoid overpaying for listings anchored to the past. The trend line is rising to meet you. Whether you’re an owner-occupant buyer or an investor, don’t be a picky buyer, as I wrote about back in 2009.
For Sellers:
The market will still reward realistic pricing paired with impeccable pre-sale preparation, but it won’t tolerate delusion. Listing high to “test the market” almost guarantees a long Days on Market and eventual price cuts. Price it right from the start based on what’s actually selling today, not what you think it should be worth based on the 2022 price you paid.