I ran some numbers this afternoon to support a discussion that fellow agent Phil Walthall and I were having today.  What we were discussing was the decline in Austin area home sales, but that prices continue to rise.  If you are into numbers, this will make sense to you.

 

The Austin market is Travis and four surrounding Counties.  From April 1 through April 19 of this year, 1158 Austin area homes sold.  The average price was $258,767.  This is straight from the Austin MLS.  From September 1 to today, the 19th, there have been 731 homes sold.  By the way, I’m talking strictly about single-family homes.  The average price for these homes was $268,678.  This brings me back to the discussion Phil and I had.  Phil’s comment was simply that there were probably fewer lower priced homes sold and that skewed the average sale price higher.

 

Everyone has been reading about the home lending crisis.  What Phil and I suspected was that many lower end buyers couldn’t get the same kinds of loans in September that they got in April.  So I went back into the MLS and looked a bit more.

 

For the time period I am talking about in April, there were 245 Austin area homes sold for $135,000 or under.  For the same time period on September, that number was just 166.  The 1158 homes that sold in April had a combined sales volume of $299,652,186.  For the 731 in September, the volume was $205,261,019.

 

Here is where it gets interesting…  There were 79 fewer homes sold in September at $135,000 than in April.  If you assume that 60 more homes at $135,000 or under sold so far in September at the average price of a little over $112,000, you add $8.857 million to September’s total sales volume.  Divide the new volume by the number of homes sold, which would have been 791 and then figure the average price, it would be $259,495.  That is just slightly above the average price for the April time period.

 

How accurate my analysis is I don’t know, but it is interesting.  I think that the math I did bears out what Phil and I were talking about.  The moral of the story is that regardless of what the stats tell you, have your REALTOR® run accurate comps when thinking of selling your Austin home of if you are looking to buy one. 

 

Any investors out there?  Same thing applies to you.  Don’t look at medians and average.  Have your local Austin REALTOR® do the right research for you.