Q3 2026 · Austin MARKET UPDATE
the market is tightening
while the price prints stall.
Across the Austin region, inventory is contracting, sales volume is rising, and buyers are conceding more of the asking price than they did a year ago — all of it happening with mortgage rates near their 52-week worst. The median price barely moved. Understanding why those facts coexist is worth real money to anyone holding property between $400,000 and $4 million.
This report is published quarterly. We use a quarterly cadence deliberately: month-to-month movement in a market this size is mostly noise, and a report built to be interesting every thirty days ends up manufacturing significance that isn't there. What follows is what we believe has actually changed.
How to read this report
We separate three kinds of statements throughout, and we label them:
Reported data — figures published by Unlock MLS, the Texas Real Estate Research Center, the FHFA, or Mortgage News Daily. Attributed to the source, reproduced without adjustment.
Arithmetic — calculations we performed on reported data, such as payment illustrations and percentage differences. The inputs are shown so you can check the output.
Our judgment — interpretation, inference, and advice. Introduced with phrasing like “our read is” or “in our judgment.” These are opinions held by people who work in this market daily. They are not facts, and where a competing interpretation is credible we say so.
Five geographies. One direction on the measures that lead.
Most Austin coverage opens with the median sales price, observes that it is flat or slightly negative, and calls the market soft. Our read is that this is not wrong so much as it is watching the slowest-moving number on the board. In our judgment the median is a rear-view mirror, and inventory, pending sales, and the close-to-list ratio are the windshield. That is an interpretive claim about which indicators lead, not a reported statistic.
Unlock MLS publishes July 2026 figures for seven geographies: the Austin–Round Rock–San Marcos MSA, the City of Austin, and Travis, Williamson, Hays, Bastrop, and Caldwell Counties. We have five of the seven in hand — Bastrop and Caldwell are not included below, and their absence means the tallies that follow describe the five reported here, not the full MSA. Here is how many of those five moved the same direction year over year.
What the data establishes
In these five geographies, inventory fell, months of supply fell, closings and pendings mostly rose, and the average close-to-list ratio rose. Mortgage rates on the publication date sat within about ten basis points of their 52-week highs. Those are reported figures.
What we infer from it
Our read: demand is absorbing supply faster than supply is being replaced, and the market is tightening beneath a flat price surface. We hold this with reasonable confidence because the inventory, months-of-supply, and close-to-list measures all moved the same way across every market we have.
Where we could be wrong. A rising close-to-list ratio has at least two credible explanations, and the data cannot distinguish between them. One is that buyers are negotiating less aggressively. The other is that sellers are pricing more accurately at the outset, so there is less gap to close. Those imply different things — the first is demand strength, the second is seller behavior — and we do not know which is dominant. We lean toward a mix of both, and that lean is a judgment, not a finding.
On timing. We expect price data to follow transaction data rather than lead it. That is a general expectation drawn from how these series have behaved historically, not a forecast with a date attached, and we are not putting a number on when or whether it happens here.
Our advice about what to do with all of this comes later in the report, and we keep it separated from the data on purpose.
The state cooled in July. The Austin region did not.
Before narrowing to Austin, it is worth establishing what the state is doing, because the most interesting thing in this quarter's data is the gap between the two.
San Antonio Board of REALTORS® July 2026 market statistics, sourced to the Texas Real Estate Research Center at Texas A&M University.
The average rose while the median fell. That is the tell.
Statewide volume growth decelerated hard between June and July. June sales ran 7.7% ahead of the prior year; July ran just 0.9% ahead — 30,219 closings. Over the same July, Austin-region closings rose 4.4% at the MSA level, 11.0% in the City of Austin, and 11.4% in Travis County. A methodological caution before reading too much into that: the statewide figure comes from the TRERC-sourced series and the regional figures from Unlock MLS, and the two are built differently, so the precise spread is not meaningful. The direction, however, is hard to dismiss: in the same month, the Austin region's transaction growth ran well ahead of the state's. Our read is that Austin is currently outperforming Texas on volume momentum, and we hold that read with moderate confidence given the cross-source comparison.
Statewide prices firmed in July. The Texas median rose 1.5% year over year to $345,000 — after posting a 0.5% decline in June. The average rose 1.4% to $441,672. One month does not make a trend, but a median moving from negative to positive territory is the direction sellers would want to see.
And here we owe readers a correction of emphasis. The June data showed the average rising while the median fell, and we read that divergence as evidence the transaction mix was shifting toward the upper tier. The July data does not support that story continuing: with the median up 1.5% and the average up only 1.4%, the average-to-median gap was essentially flat year over year — our arithmetic puts the ratio at 1.280 now against 1.281 a year ago. Whatever mix shift June appeared to show, July did not confirm it. The honest conclusion is that single-month divergences between average and median are noisy, and we weighted June's too heavily. TRERC's structural finding — that entry-level priced homes have largely disappeared from many Texas markets — still stands on its own multi-year evidence. But we are withdrawing the suggestion that the monthly statewide prints demonstrate an ongoing upward mix shift, because the newest print does not.
One more illustration of monthly noise, from within a single series this time: the statewide report's own Travis County median moved from $581,000 in June to $560,000 in July — a 3.6% swing in one month. County medians move like that routinely as the composition of a single month's sales shifts. It is why every year-over-year comparison in this report is against the same month last year, and why we would caution against reading any single month-to-month move, in either direction, as a trend.
Where Travis County sits among the major Texas counties
Median sales prices, July 2026. San Antonio Board of REALTORS®, sourced to the Texas Real Estate Research Center.
Travis County's median runs roughly 62% above the Texas statewide median and 52% above Dallas County, the next highest of the four shown. An important scope limit: the source reports these four counties only. Texas has 254 counties, and we have not verified that Travis is the most expensive of all of them — several suburban counties in the Dallas and Houston metros plausibly run higher. What we can say from this data is that Travis is the highest-priced of the four largest urban counties in Texas, by a wide margin.
TRERC's affordability work notes that Texas continues to attract strong domestic and international migration, with accessible homeownership among the most powerful drivers, and that Texas metros remain far more affordable than Los Angeles, San Francisco, or New York.
Our read: Austin sits in an unusual position — expensive relative to Texas, discounted relative to the coastal markets supplying much of its in-migration. Which of those two anchors a given buyer carries into a negotiation changes how they behave, and in our experience it is the single most useful thing to establish early in a showing conversation. That is an observation from our own transactions, not a measured finding.
Two credible sources, two different Travis County numbers
The statewide series above puts the Travis County median at $560,000 for July 2026. The Unlock MLS regional report puts it at $520,000 for the same July. Same county, same month, a $40,000 gap — 7.7% measured against the lower figure, 7.1% against the higher one. With the timing offset now eliminated, the remaining spread is purely methodological: different data universes, different property-type inclusions, different processing. We cannot tell you precisely which differences drive it, because neither publisher documents the other's exclusions.
We are not going to reconcile those figures for you, because we cannot do it honestly. They come from different publishers, different underlying series, and different months, and we do not know the precise methodological cause of the spread. Anyone who tells you they do is guessing.
What we can tell you is the practical rule: pick one source and stay in it. Comparing a TRERC-sourced figure to an Unlock MLS figure produces a number that means nothing. Within a single series, the trend is reliable. Across series, it is not. This is exactly the kind of error that produces confidently wrong pricing conversations, and it happens constantly.
Austin is not one market. It is at least five.
The spread between the strongest and weakest geography here is wide enough that a seller acting on MSA-level averages is working from the wrong information. A homeowner in Central Austin and a homeowner in Kyle are operating in materially different conditions this quarter.
| Geography | Median Price | Closed Sales | Pending Sales | New Listings | Active Listings | Months Supply | Avg. Days on Market | Close-to-List |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Austin–Round Rock–San Marcos MSA | $435,000 ↑ 1.0% | 2,739 ↑ 4.4% | 2,833 ↑ 4.1% | 4,280 ↓ 2.8% | 13,796 ↓ 9.9% | 4.7 ↓ 1.1 mo | 63 ↑ 1 day | 93.7% from 93.0% |
| City of Austin | $577,000 ↓ 1.4% | 1,005 ↑ 11.0% | 999 ↑ 4.2% | 1,444 ↓ 8.5% | 4,718 ↓ 18.2% | 4.5 ↓ 1.8 mo | 49 ↓ 2 days | 93.9% from 92.8% |
| Travis County | $520,000 ↓ <1% | 1,290 ↑ 11.4% | 1,323 ↑ 8.3% | 1,972 ↓ 3.3% | 6,586 ↓ 13.0% | 4.8 ↓ 1.7 mo | 55 ↑ 1 day | 93.7% from 92.8% |
| Williamson County | $415,000 ↓ 1.2% | 957 ↑ 6.0% | 927 ↑ 3.3% | 1,534 ↑ 2.7% | 4,258 ↓ 10.1% | 4.3 ↓ 0.9 mo | 67 ↑ 2 days | 93.9% from 93.3% |
| Hays County | $367,700 ↑ 1.0% | 344 ↓ 12.0% | 409 ↓ 7.9% | 511 ↓ 13.8% | 1,925 ↓ 5.4% | 5.0 ↓ 0.2 mo | 73 ↑ 5 days | 93.4% from 92.7% |
Reading the table the way we read it
Everything in this subsection is our interpretation of the figures above. The figures are reported; the ranking and the reasoning are ours.
Our read is that the City of Austin is the strongest submarket in the region, and we do not think it is close. It is the only geography where days on market improved. Closed sales rose 11.0%, dollar volume 11.5%, and active inventory fell 18.2% — the steepest supply contraction on the board. The median fell 1.4% while eleven percent more homes traded. Those numbers describe a market where buyers are showing up in force at the price points that clear, not a market in retreat.
Travis County tracks the city closely with 11.4% more closings, 13.0% less inventory, and 8.3% more homes under contract. Because pending sales lead closed sales by roughly a month to six weeks, that 8.3% is the most forward-looking figure in the regional report.
Williamson County is the one place more sellers chose to list — new listings up 2.7% against declines everywhere else — and it still absorbed enough of that supply to cut active inventory 10.1%. At a $415,000 median with 4.3 months of supply, Williamson is the tightest county in the region by supply measure, and its 93.9% close-to-list ratio ties the City of Austin for best in the report.
Hays County is the divergence. Closed sales down 12.0%, pendings down 7.9%, dollar volume down 6.5%, days on market up five, and the highest months-of-supply figure at 5.0. Its median rose 1.0%, which is precisely the kind of number that misleads: fewer transactions with a shifted composition can lift a median while the underlying market cools. Sellers in Buda, Kyle, San Marcos, Dripping Springs, and Wimberley should be pricing against a slower, thinner buyer pool than regional averages imply.
The pattern worth noticing: heat is running up the price ladder, not down it
Sort the four regional geographies by median price and look at what happens to their momentum. The two most expensive — the City of Austin at $577,000 and Travis County at $520,000 — posted the strongest closings growth (11.0% and 11.4%), the steepest inventory contractions (18.2% and 13.0%), and the fastest or fastest-improving days on market. The mid-priced counties — Williamson at $415,000 — ran solidly but less dramatically. The least expensive, Hays at $367,700, went backward on nearly every activity measure. Statewide, the same July: Texas volume up just 0.9% while the Austin region's priciest core grew closings at double digits.
That ordering is the opposite of the conventional assumption that entry-priced markets are always the tightest. In this data, demand is concentrating where prices are highest, not lowest. The correlation across four geographies in one month is suggestive, not proof — we cannot rule out that it reflects location preference (central versus southern corridor) rather than price band, since the two are entangled in this region. Both readings fit the data. Either way, the operational conclusion for sellers holds: a well-positioned property in the region's higher-priced central geographies is selling into the strongest currents in Central Texas right now, while the southern corridor requires more pricing discipline, not less.
Two indicators the monthly reports don't publish
The reported figures also allow two derived measures that we find more informative than anything in the headline set. Both are our arithmetic on Unlock MLS reported values. One caveat before the table: the year-ago levels are reconstructed from the reported year-over-year percentages, which are rounded to one decimal, so the year-ago columns are approximate — good to roughly the nearest percentage point of the ratio, which is precise enough for the direction and rough magnitude we cite and nothing finer.
Demand pressure — pending sales as a share of active listings. Higher means more of the standing inventory is being claimed at any moment. Listing absorption — new listings per closed sale. Lower means the market is consuming a larger fraction of what comes to market.
| Geography | Pending ÷ Active, Now | Pending ÷ Active, Yr Ago | Change | New Listings per Closing, Now | Yr Ago |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| City of Austin | 21.2% | ≈16.6% | +4.6 pts | 1.44 | ≈1.74 |
| Travis County | 20.1% | ≈16.1% | +4.0 pts | 1.53 | ≈1.76 |
| MSA | 20.5% | ≈17.8% | +2.8 pts | 1.56 | ≈1.68 |
| Williamson County | 21.8% | ≈18.9% | +2.8 pts | 1.60 | ≈1.65 |
| Hays County | 21.2% | ≈21.8% | −0.6 pts | 1.49 | ≈1.52 |
What the derived numbers add. A year ago, roughly one in six active City of Austin listings was under contract at a given moment; now it is better than one in five — the largest gain in the region. And where the city generated about 1.74 new listings for every closing a year ago, it now generates 1.44: the market is absorbing a meaningfully larger share of what comes to market. Travis County shows nearly the same profile. The ordering of these gains matches the heat gradient above — strongest in the expensive core, moderate in Williamson, absent in Hays.
And a correction the derived data forces on our own Hays commentary. Hays County's demand-pressure level — 21.2% of actives under contract — is in line with the rest of the region. What distinguishes Hays is direction: it is the only geography where that ratio slipped over the year, and the only one where closings, pendings, and new listings all fell together. Our read, stated precisely: Hays is not a weak market in level terms. It is a market that stopped improving while everything around it accelerated — shrinking on both sides, with sellers withdrawing roughly as fast as buyers. For a Hays seller the practical meaning is unchanged — price with discipline — but the mechanism matters: your risk is a thin market, not a glutted one.
The median-price paradox, explained
The MSA median rose 1.0% in July. Yet three of its reported components — the City of Austin, Travis County, and Williamson County — all posted declining medians in the same month. Statewide, the same pattern: average up, median down.
That is arithmetically possible only through composition — which here includes Bastrop and Caldwell Counties, both part of the MSA and not shown in our table. The median of a combined market is not the average of its component medians. It tracks what sold, not what anything is worth. When more transactions occur in higher-priced submarkets, or when the mix within a submarket shifts toward larger homes, the median moves independently of any individual property's value.
This matters because sellers routinely price off median headlines. If your home is a 3,400-square-foot property in a mature neighborhood, the fact that a countywide median moved 1.2% in either direction tells you almost nothing about your number. Your number comes from your own comparable set, your own days-on-market history, and an honest read of the buyer pool for your specific product.
Where this quarter sits in a six-year story
A quarterly report should say where the market is in its cycle, not just where it was last month. The Texas Real Estate Research Center's account of how we arrived here is the clearest we have read, and it runs roughly as follows.
- 2008–2020: the shortfall. Stricter mortgage lending standards, heavier regulatory scrutiny, and a long recession produced a historic slowdown in homebuilding. TRERC estimates the U.S. underbuilt by millions of homes relative to the pre-bubble trend across those twelve years.
- 2020–2021: the shock. Pandemic policy responses hit that undersupply from both sides. Supply chains halted and construction costs rose; simultaneously, trillions in stimulus and near-zero rates expanded buying power. Migration compressed several years of national demand into a short window and into a small number of markets, Texas cities prominent among them.
- 2021–2023: the plateau. The price runup itself lasted roughly eighteen months. The elevated prices lasted about three years.
- 2024–2025: the softening. Prices began easing only when mortgage rates normalized. Construction recovered gradually, but building costs did not fall, and households absorbed persistently higher living expenses alongside double-digit increases in insurance premiums.
- 2026: where we are now. Texas median prices in the first half of 2026 sat 31% above where they were six years earlier. TRERC reports that major Texas markets have seen prices fall the most, and that Austin, which had the fastest runup, remains approximately 25% above spring 2020.
One precision note. TRERC states that major markets fell the most and separately that Austin had the fastest runup. It does not state that Austin had the largest decline of the major Texas markets, and we are not going to assert it. The reported fact is the 25% figure above spring 2020.
Our read: that figure is the one Austin sellers most often misread, in both directions. A seller who bought before 2020 is, in most cases, materially ahead. A seller who bought near the 2022 peak may not be. Those are different conversations and in our judgment they should not be conducted with the same set of assumptions.
Buyers are transacting at the top of the rate band
The market strength described above — more sales, less inventory, narrower discounts — is occurring while borrowing costs sit near their worst levels of the past twelve months. Both the conforming 30-year and the 30-year jumbo are trading within about ten basis points of their 52-week highs.
Mortgage News Daily rate index, August 11, 2026. Marker shows position within the trailing 52-week range. National survey averages, not quotes. Rates move daily; this is a point-in-time snapshot within a quarterly document. Verify current pricing with your lender before acting on any figure here.
What a rate move is actually worth here
At the MSA median of $435,000 with 20% down, a $348,000 loan at today's 6.76% carries roughly $2,259 per month in principal and interest. At the 52-week low of 5.99%, that same monthly payment supports approximately $36,000 more in purchase price.
Extend that upward. A $1.5 million purchase with 20% down is a $1.2 million loan — jumbo territory. At 6.86%, principal and interest run approximately $7,870 per month. At the jumbo 52-week low of 6.10%, roughly $7,272 — a difference of about $598 monthly, or $7,200 a year, on identical terms.
What is factual here: rates on the publication date sat near the top of their trailing 52-week range, and the transaction figures for the preceding month were nonetheless positive across most of the region. Those two things are both reported.
Our judgment about what it means: a buyer pool that is transacting at the unfavorable end of the rate range is demonstrating something a pool transacting at 3% would not. If rates retrace toward the lower half of that band, our expectation is that the same pool gains purchasing power against an inventory base that has already contracted. We think that favors sellers who are positioned and on market when it happens.
The honest caveats on that judgment. We do not know whether rates will fall, and we are not predicting it — a 52-week range describes where a number has been, not where it is going, and rates have spent time at both ends of this band within the past year. We also cannot rule out that rate relief brings sellers off the sidelines faster than it brings buyers in, which would expand inventory and cut against the effect we describe. TRERC makes a version of this argument about financing reform generally: measures that increase purchasing power tend to increase demand, raise prices, and partially offset their own benefit. The same logic applies to a rate decline.
What changes as you move up the ladder
The mechanics of an Austin sale differ substantially between $450,000 and $2.5 million. Below is how we think about each band. These are our operating judgments drawn from the aggregate data above and from our own listing experience — the MLS reports cited here are published at the geography level, not the price-band level, so we present this as analysis rather than as statistics.
This band straddles the MSA median of $435,000 and the City of Austin median of $577,000. It holds the most buyers and the most rate sensitivity. Decisions here are made on the monthly payment, not the purchase price, which means every quarter-point of rate movement visibly changes showing traffic within about two weeks.
TRERC data puts the pressure in context, with two scope notes worth stating plainly. As of 2026, median-income households across the four major Texas metros — Austin, Dallas–Fort Worth, Houston, and San Antonio — spent roughly 41 to 43% of gross income on median-priced homes, against just above 30% a decade ago. That range covers all four metros; TRERC does not publish an Austin-only figure in that series, so we are not going to quote one. Separately, the Texas Housing Affordability Index stood at 1.4 as of 2025, and at 1.1 for first-time buyers, down from 1.5 in 2015. Those two measures are built differently — the 41–43% figure comes from the Atlanta Fed's monitor and includes property taxes and insurance, while the Housing Affordability Index excludes both — so they are not two views of the same number.
Our read: buyers in this band are qualified, motivated, and genuinely stretched. In our experience they will pay a fair price and will not pay a fantasy price, and pricing errors are punished fastest here because the buyer pool is large enough to reach consensus within days. We treat first-week showing volume as our most useful early diagnostic; that is a working practice of ours, not an industry standard.
Scenarios we are advising on in this band right now. These are judgment, drawn from our own client work, not statistics.
Selling, bought before 2020: you hold substantial equity and likely a low rate. The honest question is not whether you can sell well — in this band, correctly priced, you probably can — but what you are moving into and at what financing cost. We would run the full trade math before listing, not after.
Selling, bought 2021–2022: depending on what and when you bought, you may be near or below your basis. The regional recovery in transaction activity does not erase that. Sometimes the right answer is to sell anyway because life requires it; sometimes it is to hold and let the market do more work. We will tell you which one the numbers support, and it will not always be the one that produces a listing.
Buying at the median: a $500,000 purchase with 20% down at the current 6.76% runs roughly $2,597 monthly in principal and interest, before taxes and insurance — and this report has shown both of those moving. Underwrite the full payment. The compensation for buying at these rates is thinner competition and the largest inventory contraction benefit if you buy ahead of any rate retrace rather than after it. That trade-off is real in both directions and we will not pretend it resolves cleanly.
Buyers here are almost always sellers too. Many carry a mortgage originated in 2020 or 2021 at a rate far below anything currently available, which makes moving a financing decision with a real annual cost attached, not just a housing decision. TRERC identifies this lock-in dynamic as a principal driver of the post-normalization deceleration, and notes that mortgage portability proposals are aimed squarely at it.
Our read: the result is a market with fewer, more deliberate participants. In our experience active buyers here have usually done substantial work before requesting a showing, and they arrive informed.
Our judgment on what follows from that: presentation quality and information quality carry unusual weight. A buyer who has already run the numbers on surrendering a low fixed rate is not moved by enthusiasm. They are moved by a property demonstrably worth the disruption, presented so they do not have to imagine it.
Scenarios we are advising on in this band right now. Judgment, not statistics.
Selling and buying up simultaneously: the lock-in cost cuts both ways — and so does today's market shape. You surrender a low rate, but you are also buying your next home from the same constrained inventory and near-worst-case rates that constrain your buyer. In our experience the sell-side advantage of contracting inventory roughly offsets the buy-side pain more often than people expect. The math is specific to your two properties; run it, do not intuit it.
Selling to exit the market (relocation, downsizing to cash, estate): the lock-in penalty does not apply to you — you are not refinancing into anything. You are the seller this market treats best right now: thinner competition, improving close-to-list, and no repurchase exposure. If that is your situation, our read is that the current setup is genuinely favorable and the case for waiting needs a specific reason.
Buying in this band: your sellers are deliberate and your competition is informed. Offers that win here, in our experience, are complete — financing documented, timelines clean, contingencies scoped — more than they are simply highest.
Where the jumbo line actually falls. The FHFA set the 2026 baseline conforming loan limit for one-unit properties at $832,750, up $26,250 from 2025. Loan amounts above the applicable limit are classified as jumbo. Central Texas counties are not high-cost designated, so the baseline applies here — but limits are set annually and vary by county, so confirm yours with your lender rather than relying on this page.
The limit applies to the loan, not the purchase price, which means the crossover point depends on your down payment. At 20% down, a buyer stays conforming up to roughly a $1,040,000 purchase. At 10% down, roughly $925,000. A $900,000 purchase with 25% down is a conforming loan; the same purchase with 5% down is not. This is worth stating because the assumption that anything above $850,000 is automatically jumbo is common and wrong.
Where jumbo financing does apply, it priced at 6.86% on the publication date — ten basis points above the conforming 30-year and within six of its own 52-week ceiling. Jumbo terms typically involve larger reserve requirements and more documentation than conforming loans, though standards vary considerably by lender and portfolio, and the national survey average above will not match every quote.
Our read on pricing at this level: comparable sales thin out and lose precision. Two homes on the same street can justify meaningfully different values based on view, lot orientation, finish level, and the vintage of the last renovation. We regard pricing here as an act of interpretation rather than arithmetic, which is in our view why the range of credible agent opinions widens sharply.
Our judgment: the cost of a pricing error compounds. A property that sits accumulates a days-on-market history that becomes the first thing every subsequent buyer's agent mentions. We believe getting the initial position right is worth more than any amount of later repositioning. We hold that view strongly, but it is a view.
Scenarios we are advising on in this band right now. Judgment, not statistics.
Selling in the central core: the geographies posting the region's strongest activity — City of Austin and Travis County — are where much of this band's inventory sits. If the heat gradient we describe above is real, you are selling into the strongest currents in Central Texas. We would still not stretch the ask: the improving close-to-list data rewards correct pricing, and nothing in it rewards aspiration.
Selling a harder-to-comp property — acreage, view, significant renovation, unusual product: this is where the interpretation problem bites hardest and where the spread of agent opinions is widest. Demand a valuation argument, not a number. Any agent can hand you a figure; the question is whether they can defend it against the comparables that cut against it.
Buying near the conforming line: your down payment decides your financing regime. At the 2026 limit of $832,750, structuring the loan to stay conforming — at that maximum, roughly $5,407 monthly principal and interest at current rates — versus crossing into jumbo is a genuine structural choice with different reserve, documentation, and pricing consequences. Decide it with a lender before you offer, not during option period.
Most purchases in this band are discretionary. Divorce, estate settlement, and job relocation still force transactions at every price point, so “nobody has to move” would overstate it — but the share of buyers under genuine pressure is far smaller here than below $600,000.
Our read: the buyer pool is national and international as often as local, and longer days on market at this level reflect the size of that pool rather than weakness in the property. We think marketing has to reach beyond the MLS to work here, and that the gap between a competent campaign and an excellent one shows up in the final number. We cannot quantify that gap from public data; it is our assessment from running these listings.
Our judgment: exposure and pricing discipline matter more than anything else at this level, and they matter together. A strong campaign on a wrong price fails; a right price with thin exposure leaves money behind. Both have to be correct.
Scenarios we are advising on in this band right now. Judgment, not statistics.
Selling with time: discretionary sellers hold the structural advantage in a discretionary market. Preparation, photography, positioning, and launch timing can be done properly instead of quickly, and at this level the difference between properly and quickly is real money. If nothing forces your date, use that.
Selling without time — estate, divorce, relocation on a deadline: the buyer pool is measured in dozens and it does not accelerate for your calendar. Our advice is blunt: compress the preparation, never the exposure window, and price to the market that exists rather than the one your timeline needs. A forced seller who overprices at this level pays twice — once in time, once in the eventual number.
Buying: comparable scarcity cuts in your favor too — when value is interpretive, a rigorous, well-argued offer below ask can prevail in a way it rarely does in the tight-comp bands below. Cash and documented jumbo strength function as price. And on properties above $1 million, get the insurance quote bound early: this report has shown why, and at this value the annual figure is a negotiating fact, not a rounding error.
One pattern holds across every band
The close-to-list ratio improved in all five reported geographies. Buyers are negotiating less hard than a year ago. That does not mean overpricing works — it means correctly priced homes are holding their number better than they were in July 2025.
Insurance and property taxes are now doing real work on affordability
Buyers evaluate homes on price and rate. They live in them on the full monthly payment, and two components of that payment have been moving faster than the mortgage itself.
Homeowners insurance
TRERC analysis of IPUMS data shows Texas property insurance costs consistently exceeding the national average, with the gap widening notably after 2022. Statewide, Texas premiums rose 21.9% year over year in 2023 — ahead of the national 15.4% — and remained elevated in 2024 at 14.7%. Insurance accounted for roughly 15% of the total increase in owner costs from 2022 to 2024, reaching a record contribution of about 25% in 2024 alone.
Context that keeps this in proportion. Over that same 2022–2024 period, TRERC reports mortgage payments still accounted for more than 80% of the increase in owner costs, while the property tax contribution fell below 13%. Insurance also remains a relatively small share of the total monthly payment — roughly 8% of owner costs in Texas by 2024, up from about 7% in 2017. The story is not that insurance dominates the payment. It is that insurance has become a much larger share of what is changing in the payment.
Austin fares comparatively well within Texas. TRERC's metro data puts average monthly homeowners insurance in Austin at $181 as of 2024, against $238 in Dallas–Fort Worth and $225 in Houston. San Antonio was lowest of the four major metros at $157. Austin's 2023 increase of 16.9% was also the mildest of the four.
For higher-value properties the arithmetic scales. TRERC reports a Texas insurance-to-value ratio of approximately 0.54% in 2024 — about $540 annually per $100,000 of home value, against roughly $340 nationally. Applied to a $1 million property, that statewide ratio implies on the order of $5,400 per year. Treat that as an order-of-magnitude illustration rather than a quote: actual premiums at that value depend heavily on construction, roof age, claims history, and carrier appetite, and a bound quote is the only number worth planning against.
Property taxes
The prevailing assumption is that Texas property taxes have climbed steadily. On an effective basis, the data says otherwise. TRERC reports that the statewide aggregate effective tax rate — tax levied as a share of market value — declined 22.11% between 2019 and 2025, driven principally by school homestead exemption increases and compression of school maintenance-and-operations rates, with the state substituting other revenue.
Homesteads also benefit from the 10% annual cap on appraised value increases, excluding new improvements. TRERC notes a nuance that catches owners off guard: unlike a fixed-dollar exemption, a capped year can be made up later. If market value rises 15% and appraised value is limited to 10%, a subsequent year of 5% market growth can still produce a taxable-value increase above 5%, up to the 10% ceiling.
Time-sensitive for owners of non-homestead property
TRERC identifies the state's temporary 20% appraisal cap on real property other than residential homesteads — the 20% Circuit Breaker — as set to expire at the end of this year.
If you hold an Austin-area second home, lake property, or investment property that is not your homestead, that expiration is worth reviewing with your tax professional now rather than after the next appraisal notice arrives. We are flagging the policy item, not advising on it. Confirm your specific exposure with a qualified tax advisor or property tax attorney.
Four housing-finance proposals that would change your math
Several federal proposals would alter affordability through the financing channel rather than through supply or subsidy. TRERC's Summer 2026 analysis works through the mechanics of each. None is settled policy. All are worth understanding, because each carries a second-order effect that tends to get lost in the headline.
- The 50-year mortgage. On a $400,000 loan at 6%, extending from 30 to 50 years lowers the payment from roughly $2,398 to $2,106. But longer-duration debt normally prices higher: at 7%, the 50-year payment rises to $2,407 — above the 30-year at 6%. Roughly one percentage point of differential erases the entire benefit. TRERC's counterpoint to equity-buildup critics is worth noting: measured against renting, where no equity accrues at all, even modest gains leave the owner ahead, and the option to refinance to a shorter term stays open throughout.
- Prepayment penalties. Counterintuitive but structurally sound. Prepayment risk is estimated at 50–100 basis points of a mortgage rate — potentially more than half the mortgage premium over the 10-year Treasury. Introducing penalties could cut rates by as much as a full percentage point. TRERC's illustration: dropping 6% to 5.25% on a $400,000 loan reduces the payment from $2,398 to $2,209. The cost is friction on future moves and refinances.
- Mortgage portability. Aimed directly at lock-in, allowing borrowers to carry a low existing rate to a new home. The unintended consequence sits in the yield curve: portable mortgages would extend expected duration, moving pricing to a higher point on the Treasury curve and likely raising rates for first-time buyers. Retroactive application would also impose losses on existing mortgage-backed security holders.
- GSE capital expansion. On January 8, 2026, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were directed to expand MBS purchases by $200 billion. For scale, the residential mortgage market exceeded $17 trillion at the end of 2025 and grows roughly $500 billion annually. TRERC's read is directional easing of modest magnitude — but usefully timed, since the Federal Reserve has shed roughly $17 billion in MBS monthly since late 2022, a runoff that could keep pressuring rates upward for another three to nine years.
The common thread TRERC identifies is that every one of these works by making borrowing easier or cheaper, which increases demand, which tends to increase prices and partially offset the intended benefit. That is not an argument against them. It is an argument for understanding that financing reform and price relief are not the same thing.
What we are watching, and the numbers that would change our mind
A market call is only worth something if it can be wrong. Below are the measures we will track into the fourth quarter, with the thresholds that would confirm or refute the read above. These thresholds are ours. We chose them as reasonable tests of our own reasoning; they are not industry benchmarks and no one else uses them. We will report against them in the next edition, including where we were wrong.
The next edition will open by scoring this quarter's calls against these thresholds — the ones we got right and the ones we did not. If you want to hold us to that, this page is the place to come back to. The URL does not change between editions.
What we would advise, separated by which side of the table you are on
Everything above is the market verdict. Everything below is advice — our opinion about what a reasonable person might do given the data, not a finding derived from it. Reasonable advisors looking at the same figures could counsel differently, and your own circumstances matter more than any of it.
If you are considering selling
- Your competition is thinner than it has been in a year. Active inventory fell in all five reported geographies, by as much as 18.2% in the City of Austin, and fewer sellers came to market in four of five. A well-positioned listing faces less direct competition today than last summer.
- The negotiating environment has improved for you. Close-to-list ratios rose in every market — measurable evidence that buyers are conceding more of the gap than they were twelve months ago.
- Do not price off the median. The MSA median rose while three component geographies fell, and statewide the average rose while the median fell. Those numbers describe the mix of what sold, not what your property is worth. Insist on a comparable-set analysis specific to your product and neighborhood — and insist on seeing the comparables that argue against your preferred number as well as for it.
- We treat the first two weeks as decisive. Regional average days on market is 63 and it rose in four of five geographies. Our view is that a listing opening at the wrong number spends its best exposure window teaching the market it is overpriced, and that every later reduction negotiates against that history. This is a strongly held opinion of ours; we cannot prove it from the published data.
- Hays County sellers should calibrate down. Closed sales fell 12.0%, pendings 7.9%, and days on market rose five — those are reported. Our advice that regional optimism does not apply cleanly south of Travis County follows from them.
- In the upper bands, we are no longer citing a statewide mix tailwind. June's average-up, median-down print suggested one; July's print — median up 1.5%, average up 1.4% — did not confirm it. What the upper bands can lean on instead is regional: the region's higher-priced central geographies (City of Austin, Travis County) posted the strongest volume growth and steepest inventory contraction in July. That is a geographic pattern, not a price-band statistic, and we label it as such.
If you are considering buying
- You are competing under the least favorable financing of the past year — which also means you are competing against fewer people than you would if rates retraced. There is a genuine trade-off here, not an obvious answer.
- Underwrite the full carrying cost, not the payment quote. Insurance and taxes have moved materially. Get a bound insurance quote before you are under contract, particularly on older roofs and on properties above $1 million.
- Know where your loan crosses the conforming limit. The 2026 baseline is $832,750 for one-unit properties, and it applies to the loan rather than the purchase price — so your down payment determines whether you are conforming or jumbo. Confirm your county's limit with your lender. If you land in jumbo, structure it early: reserve and documentation standards differ, and in our experience sellers at that level read financing strength as a term of the offer.
- Inventory is contracting, not expanding. Any strategy premised on waiting for more selection has the current direction of the data working against it.
Austin market questions, answered directly
Is the Austin housing market going up or down in 2026?
Both, depending on the measure. As of July 2026, median prices were roughly flat — up 1.0% across the Austin–Round Rock–San Marcos MSA, down 1.4% in the City of Austin. Transaction activity, however, is clearly strengthening: closed sales rose in four of five reported geographies, active inventory fell in all five, and average close-to-list price improved in all five. Prices are flat while the underlying market tightens.
What is the median home price in Austin right now?
In July 2026, Unlock MLS reported a median sales price of $577,000 within the City of Austin, $520,000 in Travis County, $435,000 across the Austin–Round Rock–San Marcos MSA, $415,000 in Williamson County, and $367,700 in Hays County. A separate Texas Real Estate Research Center series put Travis County at $560,000 for the same July; the two use different methodologies and should not be compared to each other. These are medians of what sold, not valuations.
How does Austin compare to the rest of Texas?
Travis County is the highest-priced of the four largest urban counties in Texas. Using the July 2026 statewide series, Travis had a median of $560,000 against $369,000 in Dallas County, $330,495 in Harris County, and $295,813 in Bexar County — with a Texas statewide median of $345,000. That places Travis roughly 62% above the state median and 52% above Dallas County. Austin-region volume also outgrew the state in July: regional closings rose 4.4% while statewide sales rose 0.9%, though those figures come from different publishers and are directional rather than precise.
How long does it take to sell a house in Austin?
Average days on market in July 2026 was 63 days across the MSA, 49 days in the City of Austin, 55 days in Travis County, 67 days in Williamson County, and 73 days in Hays County. The City of Austin was the only geography where time-to-sale improved year over year, by two days. Homes above $1 million typically take longer as a structural matter, because the buyer pool at that level is smaller.
Is 2026 a good time to sell a house in Austin?
Conditions favor correctly priced sellers more than they did a year ago. Active inventory contracted between 5.4% and 18.2% depending on the county, fewer new listings came to market in four of five geographies, and buyers conceded a larger share of asking price than in July 2025 in every market reported. The counterweight is that mortgage rates sit near their 52-week highs, which constrains the buyer pool. Whether it is right for you depends on your property, your price band, and your timeline — not on the market alone.
Are Texas home prices rising or falling right now?
The most recent statewide print firmed. In July 2026, the Texas median sales price rose 1.5% year over year to $345,000 and the average rose 1.4% to $441,672 — after June showed the median slightly negative. Worth noting: June's data had the average rising while the median fell, a pattern that suggests the sales mix shifting upward, but July did not repeat it, which is a useful reminder that single-month average-versus-median divergences are noisy. Statewide sales volume grew just 0.9% in July, a sharp deceleration from June's 7.7%.
What are mortgage rates in Austin today?
As of August 11, 2026, the Mortgage News Daily index showed the 30-year fixed at 6.76%, the 30-year jumbo at 6.86%, the 15-year fixed at 6.27%, the 7/6 SOFR ARM at 6.35%, 30-year FHA at 6.29%, and 30-year VA at 6.31%. Both the conforming 30-year and the jumbo were within about ten basis points of their 52-week highs. These are national survey figures rather than quotes, and rates move daily.
How much is homeowners insurance in Austin?
Texas Real Estate Research Center analysis put average monthly homeowners insurance in the Austin metro at $181 as of 2024 — below Dallas–Fort Worth at $238 and Houston at $225. Texas premiums rose 21.9% statewide in 2023 and 14.7% in 2024. TRERC reports a Texas insurance-to-value ratio near 0.54%, roughly $540 per year for every $100,000 of home value. Premiums on higher-value properties vary widely by construction, roof age, and claims history, so a bound quote is the only reliable figure.
Are Texas property taxes going up?
Not on an effective basis. TRERC reports that the statewide aggregate effective tax rate — tax levied as a share of market value — declined 22.11% between 2019 and 2025, driven by increased school homestead exemptions and compression of school maintenance-and-operations rates. Individual bills can still rise as property values grow. Owners of non-homestead property should note that the state's temporary 20% appraisal cap is set to expire at the end of 2026; confirm your exposure with a qualified tax professional.
What is happening in the Austin luxury market above $1 million?
Financing is the first thing that changes. The 2026 FHFA baseline conforming loan limit is $832,750 for one-unit properties, and it applies to the loan amount rather than the purchase price — so at 20% down a buyer stays conforming up to roughly a $1,040,000 purchase, and at 10% down to roughly $925,000. Above that, jumbo terms apply, priced at 6.86% on August 11, 2026 and near the top of its 52-week range. Beyond financing, comparable sales become thinner and less directly applicable. Our read is that pricing at this level depends more on interpretation than arithmetic, that most purchases above $1.5 million are discretionary, and that the buyer pool is often national rather than local — which in our judgment makes exposure strategy and initial pricing position the variables that determine the outcome. That last part is our opinion, not a published statistic.
Which Austin-area county is strongest right now?
By July 2026 data, the City of Austin. It posted the largest inventory contraction at 18.2%, an 11.0% increase in closed sales, an 11.5% increase in dollar volume, and was the only geography where average days on market improved. Travis County closely tracks it. Hays County is weakest, with closed sales down 12.0%, pending sales down 7.9%, and days on market up five.
How far above pre-pandemic levels are Austin home prices?
The Texas Real Estate Research Center reports that Texas median home prices in the first half of 2026 were 31% higher than six years earlier, and that Austin — which had the fastest runup — remains approximately 25% above spring 2020 levels. TRERC separately notes that major Texas markets have seen prices fall the most, though it does not identify Austin as having the single largest decline, and we do not claim it does.
What we know, and what we do not
Regional transaction data. Unlock MLS Central Texas Housing Report, July 2026, covering single-family homes, condominiums, and townhomes, compared year over year against July 2025. Unlock MLS reports on MLS-only data.
Statewide data. San Antonio Board of REALTORS® July 2026 Texas market statistics, sourced to the Texas Real Estate Research Center at Texas A&M University. Where this edition references June 2026 statewide figures, it does so explicitly to show month-over-month change.
Economic and policy data. Texas Real Estate Research Center, Tierra Grande, Summer 2026 — articles by Daniel Oney, Yanling Mayer, Jorge Barro, Tian Su and Mallika Natarajan, and Lynn D. Krebs.
Rate data. Mortgage News Daily rate index, August 11, 2026. National survey averages, not quotes.
Loan limits. Federal Housing Finance Agency, 2026 conforming loan limit values. The baseline for one-unit properties is $832,750, up $26,250 from 2025, with a high-cost ceiling of $1,249,125. Limits vary by county and are reset annually; confirm yours with a lender.
On the close-to-list ratio. Unlock MLS publishes this as “average close to list price” without specifying in the snapshot whether the denominator is original or final list price. That distinction materially changes how the level should be read — 93.7% against an original list price means something different from 93.7% against a final one. We therefore rely on the year-over-year direction, which is unaffected by the choice of basis so long as it is applied consistently, and we draw no conclusion from the level itself.
Payment illustrations. Principal-and-interest figures are our own arithmetic using the stated rates and loan amounts, excluding taxes, insurance, HOA dues, and mortgage insurance. They demonstrate the sensitivity of payment to rate; they are not loan estimates.
On mixing sources. The statewide and regional series in this report come from different publishers, cover different months, and are built on different underlying methodologies. We present them separately and we do not average, blend, or reconcile them — most visibly in the case of the Travis County median, where the two series differ by $40,000 for the same July. Trends within a single series are reliable. Comparisons across series are not.
What we are not claiming. The MLS reports cited here are published at the geography level and do not break out performance by price band. Our price-band commentary is analysis and operating judgment, not statistics, and we have labeled it that way rather than dressing inference up as data. We will publish price-band-level statistics when we can source them to an audit we can stand behind, and not before.
Known gaps in this edition. Unlock MLS reports seven geographies; we have five. Bastrop and Caldwell Counties are not represented, so our tallies describe the five markets shown rather than the complete MSA. The statewide county comparison covers four counties out of 254, which is enough to rank those four and not enough to rank Texas. Insurance figures from IPUMS reflect 2024, the most recent year in TRERC's series, and premiums have continued to move since. Rate figures are a single day's reading inside a document meant to stand for a quarter.
On the difference between what we know and what we think. Where a conclusion rests on inference rather than a reported figure, this report says so in the text rather than in a disclaimer at the bottom. Where two credible explanations fit the same data, it names both. We would rather be visibly uncertain than confidently wrong, and we would rather you be able to check our reasoning than take it on trust.
We would rather tell you the truth than tell you what wins the listing.
Most sellers receive an opinion of value calibrated to win their business. That is a poor way to make a decision involving your largest asset. We do the analysis first, tell you what the data supports, and let the engagement follow from that — including when the honest answer is that this is not your quarter to sell.
If you own a home in Austin, Travis, Williamson, or Hays County and want an unvarnished read on where it stands, that conversation costs you nothing and carries no obligation.
Brayson Verzella · Team Leader and Lead Listing Agent
Team Infinity Real Estate Group at Real Broker, LLC · TREC #0538286
Brayson@TeamInfinitySA.com · Austin 512-886-7222 · San Antonio 210-361-6079
Licensed agent in Central Texas? Learn about joining Team Infinity.
Central Texas Quarterly Market Report, Third Quarter 2026 edition. Provided for informational purposes. Not an appraisal, and not tax, legal, or financial advice. Property values are specific to individual properties and determined by their own comparable sets. Consult qualified tax, legal, and lending professionals regarding your circumstances.