Austin’s prosperous economic growth, driven by a rise in skilled, wealthy, entrepreneurial new residents migrating to the up-and-coming technology industry, has fuelled the attractiveness of the city to outsiders. The rise in population and therefore demand for housing, whilst beneficial for existing residents, has meant that the established housing inventory in Austin has fallen by 15.6% in 2019.
That being said, Austin is demonstrating an incredibly healthy housing market with the city breaking the annual home sales record in 2019 with 33,084 homes sold in the Austin metro area, a 7% increase YoY. With $13.2 billion in volume of sales, it also surpassed all previous recorded data with an 11% increase YoY.
A study conducted by the Real Estate Centre at Texas A&M University claims that a balanced housing market has approximately 6.5 months of housing inventory available at all times. Whilst existing homes are being snapped up in a city heavily in demand for its bohemian lifestyle, accessibility to the great outdoors in Lake Austin and the Texan countryside, as well its flourishing live music and art scenes, consumers are looking to new-build homes to fulfil their Austin dream-home fantasies.
Austin is seeing a record number of home sales year on year. With demand like this, Austin is a great place to think about investing, especially with developers planning to construct new, purpose-built skyscrapers in the downtown area for tech giants. Zillow named Austin as the hottest housing market in the US for 2020 from a panel of 110 real estate experts and economists. A significant majority, 83%, of these experts expect home values to rise more than the US national average of 2.8% this year.
Austin is a strong market in 2020 and is forecast to only increase in prosperity from here on in. If you are looking to buy in planning for your future or if you recognise the investment opportunity in Austin, contact us at Propeterra today.