Sticker shock

Austin raises the roof with biggest jump in homes selling above list price, says report

Austin home sellers are cashing in as offers swell over asking price.

Photo courtesy of AmCap

If you’ve heard the wild stories about insanely high offers for homes in Austin — or you’ve been a character in one of those stories — we now have data that shows this is no fairytale.

Residential real estate platform Redfin reported March 24 that the average home in the Austin metro area sold for 7.1 percent above its asking price during the four-week period that ended March 14. That was the biggest gap between asking price and sale price among the 47 major metro areas included in the Redfin analysis.

Just a year ago, the average Austin home sold for 0.9 percent below the asking price, Redfin says. The jump from 0.9 percent to 7.1 percent represents the biggest year-over-year gain among the 47 metro areas.

Redfin provides this example of what the 7.1 percent gap looks like: A home in the Austin area listed at $400,000 sold for roughly $428,000 in the four-week period that ended March 14. On top of that, the typical home in the area sold last month in 30 days — 12 days faster than the year before.

“Nearly every offer my clients make faces competition, and most homes are going for more than 20 percent over asking price,” April Miller, a Redfin agent in Austin, says in a release.

“I recently submitted an offer on behalf of a client for a remodeled three-bedroom, two-bathroom home listed at $515,000,” Miller adds. “We offered $100,000 over asking price and waived the appraisal and financing contingencies, and we still came in third out of 38 total offers. Every single potential buyer offered more than the asking price, and four of the offers were $100,000 or more over.”

What’s behind these bidding wars? Redfin cites the number of affluent people moving to the Austin area as a factor. In Austin, the average out-of-towner had an $852,500 homebuying budget last year. That budget was 32 percent bigger than the homebuying budget of a local resident.

Elsewhere in Texas, the typical home in the Dallas area sold for 0.3 percent above the asking price in the four-week period that ended March 14, according to Redfin. In the San Antonio (0.9 percent) and Houston (1.4 percent) areas, the typical home sold below the asking price.

Nationwide, the average home in the U.S. sold for exactly 100 percent of its list price during the four-week period that ended March 14 — an all-time high since Redfin started tracking this data in 2016.

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Hot Market

Austin housing market breaks another record as median home price hits $550,000

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In February 2021, the city's median home price was $491,000. It's now $550,562.

Record-breaking milestones continue for the Austin real estate market, according to the Austin Board of Realtors' latest data. ABoR's April 2021 report, released May 18, details new all-time highs and unprecedented growth at the city, county, and metro levels.

Home sales in the city of Austin skyrocketed 51.4 percent in April 2021 compared to April 2020, ABoR says. And while the city was under shelter-in-place orders last year that essentially put the market on hold, last month's home sales figure (1,167 sales) was an all-time high for any April on record, the report notes.

With that jump in sales came a very significant jump in price. The median home price in Austin soared 31.7 percent last month to $550,562 — the highest price ever recorded. By comparison, in February 2021 — just two months prior — the city's median price made waves as it neared the $500,000 mark for the very first time.

Travis County was also home to significant growth last month, with home sales up 46.8 percent year-over-year and the median home price up a whopping 37.8 percent to $537,500. And at the metro level, Austin-Round Rock's median sale price clocked in at $460,000 in April 2021, up 42 percent from the previous year, with sales up 37 percent.

“One year ago, shelter-in-place orders effectively ground real estate transactions to a halt, leaving uncertainty in the market,” Susan Horton, 2021 ABoR president, said in a release. “Although striking at face value, last month’s housing market activity demonstrates not only a strong recovery since last spring, but significant growth beyond that recovery.”

That growth has led to an increasingly competitive Central Texas housing market, with very little inventory and homes flying off the market in mere days. In Austin proper, homes spent only seven days on the market last month, and across the five-county metro area, homes were on the market for just 17 days.

Still, Horton remains optimistic about the market in the months to come, noting that "housing inventory was slightly higher in April than in March, and the pace of home price appreciation month to month is slowing, indicating that the rush on the housing market at the beginning of the year could be easing."

home-for-sale reports