Austin Luxury Home Market Update June 2011

The first question that one must answer or define when speaking of the "Luxury Home Market" is "What is the definition of a Luxury Home?". Glad you asked.

In the Austin market, a luxury home may have a variety of notable characteristics, starting with the price of the home, but price alone does not define "Luxury". In our Greater Austin real estate market, we have residential properties that range in price from ~$100k to approximately $20M. Many people are surprised to learn how much of the Austin market is comprised of homes over $1M. Until rather recently, Austin has been a low profile destination for home owners, but with the migration of more and more celebrities and high profile events to the area such as SXSW, ACL, ROT Rally, and the new F1 Race Track--Austin is showing up on more and more personal and professional GPS locators. In the high tech and social media arena alone, almost every major player in the US has some presence in Austin--many of which have some of their most important people assets in our fair city.


Back to the definition. A more complete definition of a specific luxury home would include the neighborhood, amenities, type of home, size of the lot (in some cases), and potentially a view of a significant local "feature" (water view or water frontage, city view, golf course view, major greenbelt view, etc). However, for the sake of statistics and numbers, we will limit our statistics to just one central dimension of the luxury criteria--Price. This will give us a very strong first look at Austin's Luxury Market. I will be defining the Luxury Home Market in Austin Texas as any home with a listing price starting at approximately Twice the Median Home Value of the typical home sold. Median home values are approximately $200,000, so we will define the Luxury Home (LH) to be any home whose listing or sold value was $400,000 or more. I will also define a separate Luxury category to further refine the numbers as Premium Luxury Homes (PLH). For the sake of these numbers, I am defining the PLH as any home listed or sold over $1,000,000 ($1M).

Active Listings:

• All Single Family Homes: currently there are 14,143 Single Family homes, Condos and Townhouses For Sale* in Greater Austin
• Luxury: 3,095 of these homes are priced at or over $400,000 (~ 22% of the total available homes)
• Premium Luxury: 676 of these homes are priced at or above $1M*

Under Contract or Sold, Year to Date, through June 23rd, 2011:

• All Single Family, Condos and Townhomes: 12,257 homes have either closed in 2011 or are under contract to close currently
• Luxury: 1,687 of these homes were at or above $400,000
• Premium Luxury: 201 of those homes were sold at or above $1M *

Areas of interest:

Luxury homes sold YTD have significant weighting on West side of I-35. Not all the luxury homes were sold East of I-35 but many of the areas of great buyer interest were found from the river in downtown Austin, east of I-35, all the way up to RR-620 and over to Lake Travis on the West side of Greater Austin. This includes such well known communities as Tarrytown, Enfield, Clarksville, Oak Forest, Steiner Ranch, River Place, Westminster Glen, Great Hills, Davenport Ranch, Rob Roy, Long Canyon, Cat Mountain, Lake Pointe and Barton Creek. Additionally, home in the West Round Rock and South Lake Travis areas had significant representation in these numbers. Some of the peripheral Austin area communities on to the north and surrounding the lake included Rough Hollow, Lakeway, Falconhead, Ranch at Brushy Creek, and Behren's Ranch. South West Austin also continues to be an area of interest, notably in master planned communities such as Circle C,  and the master planned community Avery Ranch, in NW Austin. Of course, many other communities and areas are represented in these numbers. These are just a few of the communities that have gotten buyer's interest.

Home Values in Luxury Class homes:

• Most Expensive homes sold. The two most expensive homes that sold YTD in 2011, sold for $5.8M each. 
• Median Home values in the Luxury Class Homes:
• Median ppsf: $179.35 
• Median sold price: $525,000
• Sales price as a % of List price: 96.1%
• Largest home sold: 18,955 sf
• Median Days on Market: 50 days 

If you are interested in buying a home in Austin Luxury Home market and need a Realtor ®, I would be honored to assist you in your home purchase and search.

tT

Tim Thornton, Realtor ®
Top Producer 2010, 2009, 2008
Century Club member
Zip Realty, Inc.
Austin, Texas
(512) 914.4665  mobile phone

*$1M homes include $999k; homes For Sale include Pending home sales.