The times are changing
Austin housing market to see most dramatic shift in 2023, forecast shows
A new forecast envisions a massive shift in Austin’s homebuying market next year.
By July 2023, the Austin metro area is projected to witness the most dramatic swing from a sellers’ market to a buyers’ market among the country’s 100 largest metro areas, according to the Knock real estate platform.
In a buyers’ market, sellers typically accept a lower price than they listed their houses for. The opposite is true in a sellers’ market, where homes often sell for more than the list price. The Austin area is projected to have the lowest sale-to-list-price ratio in July 2023.
Knock notes that the median sale price of a home in the Austin area climbed 71 percent during the height of the pandemic, compared with 39.9 percent nationwide.
Knock predicts the median home price in the Austin area will reach $594,893 in July 2023. That would represent a 15.5 percent jump from the $515,000 figure reported by the Austin Board of Realtors for this July.
“As the market continues to become more balanced, 15 of the 100 largest housing markets are projected to favor buyers by July 2023, while 27 more are expected to move to neutral territory, where neither buyers nor sellers have the upper hand,” Knock says.
Knock’s outlook for the Austin homebuying market isn’t as dire as the one expressed by Americans in a new survey.
In the survey, conducted by the Consumer Affairs website, 33 percent of respondents singled out Austin as the U.S. market mostly likely headed for a housing crash. That was the highest percentage for any market cited in the survey.
As a whole, local real estate professionals don’t fear a housing crash here, but they do acknowledge the Austin market is cooling off. For example, homes for sale in the Austin area spent an average of 22 days on the market this July, up 10 days from July 2021.
“The Austin real estate market’s inventory and mortgage interest rates have returned to pre-pandemic levels in recent months. It’s not the intense sellers’ market it was a few months ago, and sellers should reset their expectations,” Ryan Leahy, regional president at Austin mortgage lending company HomeTown Texas, says in an Austin Board of Realtors news release.
“For the first time in a long time,” Leahy adds, “buyers have more flexibility and leverage in the transaction.”
