Austin Real Estate (Unnamed Copywriting) 9 of 10

As home prices continue to fall around the nation, Austin has finally hit the bottom of its slump. The mortgage crisis has lowered home values nationwide by over 20% in the last year, and they continue to fall. New home purchases are down, foreclosure rates are up, and overall home sales are down as well.

But, this isn’t the case in Austin. Like the rest of the nation, we were hit by the housing crisis. Home prices here fell by more than 10%. Not only did they fall, but they stayed low for a great many number of moths.

It may be early to be optimistic, but all accounts show that this sip in Austin real estate is over. The average home price and the median home price in Austin have both risen back to levels that they were at a year ago, and by all accounts, they look to be continuing to rise.

The decline in home prices here happened quickly at first, like it did everywhere else in the country. But, unlike the rest of the nation, after the first year, they were already starting to bottom out. The average home price did continue to fall, but at a much slower pace than the pace of the rest off the national real estate market.

For the majority of 2008, Austin home prices fell less than 5% overall, and started to begin the climb back up by the end of the year. But, it takes more than a month or two of increase to be able to declare that the worst is behind us.

But, for the entirety of this year, both the average and median home values have risen in Austin, and they have done so both dramatically and consistently.

Since January, the median home price has increased by almost 13,000 dollars to a point that it hasn’t been at since March of last year. The average home price has increased over 12,000 dollars in that same amount of time as well. That’s a 7 percent and 5 percent increase, respectively.

This is certainly not enough to say that we are out of the woods yet. There are strict mortgage guidelines coming in January that threaten to hinder home purchases even further, and our overall economy is still nowhere close to what it needs to be. Unemployment last month topped out at over 9% last month, the highest it has been in decades. As successful as Austin has been at insulating itself from the crises that the rest of the nation has faced, we are still not at the point that we can safely assume it all to be over.

But, these recent changes do bring to light the prowess of the Austin real estate market. In a time where the national average home price has dropped to below 180,000 dollars for the first time in a decade, ours is holding strong at 243,000 dollars. At a time when the rest of the nation’s home values are declining, ours are still on the rise. Especially as compared with the rest of the nation, it is a good time to live in Austin.