“The Austin-Round Rock MSA is one of the fastest growing in the country, people want to live here, and job creators see opportunity to be successful here,” ABoR President Susan Horton said in a press release. “Our housing market is undergoing growing pains and creating a paradox—affordable from the outside looking in, but increasingly unaffordable for those who already call Austin home. While more homes are selling than ever before, it’s more and more difficult to find one.”
In Georgetown, residential sales decreased 22.3% year over year. However, median prices in the area continue to rise, increasing 24.8% year over year to $349,450. Georgetown also was reported to have 0.2 months of housing inventory, the report said.
Williamson County residential sales also decreased 10.6% to 1,206 sales, and sales dollar volume increased 52.9% to $533.4 million. The median price increased 40.4% to $400,000. During the same period, new listings fell 0.7%, and active listings dropped 85.6%, the report said. The housing inventory also declined 1.5 months year over year to 0.2 months of inventory, it said.
Across the five-county metropolitan statistical area, home sales increased 13.1% year over year to 3,603—a record for March. At the same time, active listings plummeted 78.3% to 1,202 listings, keeping housing inventory at a record-low 0.4 months of inventory, or 1.4 fewer months than in March 2020.
Jim Gaines, an economist at the Real Estate Research Center at Texas A&M University, stated in the release that rapid home price growth and shrinking housing inventory levels are impacting housing markets across major metros in Texas and nationally.
"While Austin leads the state in home price growth, this trend is also happening in Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth and San Antonio due to high demand and limited housing supply,” he said in the release. “For a market that has experienced several decades of strong population and employment growth, significant gains in both sales activity and housing costs across the region are to be expected as Austin expands into a large metropolitan area.”
