Steve's Austin Realty Blog

I learned a new term this week at the Keller Williams camp in Austin. Agents from declining markets that have turned into Buyer Markets referred to the real estate “pretenders”, who are now dropping like flies. This year will be the first year in a decade that membership in the National Associati...

Many people don't realize how geographically spread out the Austin Metro area is. I'm going to share with you an example of the actual drive Sylvia and I made yesterday while tending to some listings.We live in Oak Hill ('A' on the map), which puts us about 12 miles from Downtown Austin. We left ...

Rents continue increasing overall in Austin, as the number of homes rented drops. The average leased price of a home in Austin for June 2007 is $1364 per month, up 7.5% from $1269 in June of 2006. Average days-on-market for homes rented in June 2007 was 41 days. The median days on market was 28 d...

Below are the June 2007 and YTD mid-year real estate sales stats for Austin and surrounding areas. These are for single family homes, condos are not included. The most interesting thing to me on the first chart below for June sales is that the median days on market is 28 days. That means half of ...

A Realtor friend of mine, from a city and state which shall remain unnamed, called me the other day to ask if I knew what could be done about the fact that a disgruntled party in one of his deals (not his client) had registered the dot com of his first and last name and put up a "this Realtor Suc...

I moved two new renters in on Sunday July 1st. Both moved into homes that had been vacated by tenants with leases ending Saturday June 30th. There are all manner of things that can go wrong with such a tight turnaround, especially on a weekend. Nevertheless, I've always been a proponent of quick-...

Some years ago, our Texas Association of Realtors Sales Contract for Homes was changed to include a fill-in-the-blank spot where the Seller can contribute a certain amount of money toward the Buyer's purchase of a Residential Service Contract (commonly called a Home Warranty), such as those offer...

The average rental price in Austin is up 7.6% from May of last year to $1377. The Median rental rate is up 3% to $1175/mo. Days on Market is down 27% and number of homes leased is down 15%. In short, our Austin rental market for single family homes continues to chug along very well, with rents st...

I was out one evening last month with a friend of mine who is also a Realtor. We drove in his $50K Mercedes SUV, which, at two months old, still had the new car smell. He had written up two Buyer deals that day and remarked to me that he thought his new sled was helping his real estate business. ...

Since our local news media thinks the Austin Real Estate Market is “cooling”, based on only a 1% increase in number of sales the first quarter of 2007 compared to 2006 (smallest increase in several years), I thought I’d offer another viewpoint of what determines the strength of a real estate mark...