Luxe Austin Homes - Grossman & Jones Group

"Mortgage rates drop again, creating opportunity for homebuyers: Freddie Mac"

Fox Business reports, "mortgage rates dropped back down again last week and even though it was slight, the decrease had an impact on homebuyer demand, according to Freddie Mac.

The average rate for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage fell to 6.33% for the week ending Jan. 12, according to Freddie Mac's Primary Mortgage Market Survey. This was a decrease from the previous week when it averaged 6.48% but remains significantly higher than last year when it was 3.45%.

The average rate for a 15-year mortgage was 5.52% last week, down from 5.73% the week before and up from 2.62% last year.  

Mortgage rates have fluctuated in the 6% to 7% range since September, Freddie Mac's data shows. Even though the changes are incremental from week-to-week, the…

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"2022’s Hottest ZIP Codes"

Opendoor writes, "recently, one-third of people across the U.S. told us they would relocate for a lifestyle change. Whether to be closer to outdoor and recreational activities or to join a close-knit community, the desire to belong remained strong in 2022 as the recalibration of work and personal priorities encouraged people to move away from city centers.

To see where people were buying homes in 2022, we reviewed the top 20 hottest neighborhoods across Opendoor markets. While the top 10 included many repeat favorites, it was the next 10 neighborhoods that were most intriguing. One example: Winter Garden, FL jumped up 5 spots from 2021.

Rising to the top 

These rising neighborhoods have a common thread: a small-town feel while close to a…

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"Home Price Growth Is Cooling Fast—Does It Spell a Big Break for Homebuyers This Year?"

Realtor.com writes, "December brought good tidings to homebuyers in the real estate market.

Nationally, median home list prices dropped about 11% from their peak over the summer to hit $400,000 in December, according to a recent Realtor.com® report. While prices were still up by about 8.4% year over year in December, this was the first time in a year that they rose by only single digits.

In another holiday gift for home shoppers, the number of properties for sale nationally shot up more than 50% compared with a year ago. And homes are sitting on the market for longer, giving buyers an opportunity to think about whether this is the right home for them instead of having to put in an offer on the spot.

Mortgage interest rates even dipped from…

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"The Supertalls Are Coming to Austin"

Bloomberg.com writes, "the city of Austin is building up, and its once-modest skyline is getting weird.

Due in 2026 is a mixed-use high-rise called Waterline, designed by the New York firm Kohn Pedersen Fox. At 1,022 feet, the building qualifies as a “supertall,” one of just a handful of these spectacular skyscrapers in the US outside Chicago or New York City. When it’s finished, the project will rank as the tallest building in Texas. Designed like a stack of several different buildings, Waterline will stand out on a skyline that’s growing up faster than almost any other nationwide.

But it won’t stand alone. Groundbreaking is due this year on an even-taller supertall, the Wilson Tower. Wrapped in a dusky golden brise-soleil running the length of…

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"Expert Economist Predictions For The Housing Market In 2023: Will Home Prices Decrease?"

Yahoo Finance reports, "the Federal Reserve was under pressure to start its roughly one-year-long journey to control inflation by raising interest rates as a result of stubbornly high costs during 2022.

The housing market has been under tremendous pressure as a result of those month-over-month rises in interest rates because mortgage rates rise in tandem with each Fed rate increase.

The Fed increased borrowing costs, which discouraged prospective homebuyers; in November, sales of new single-family homes fell to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 640,000, down from 756,000 the year before.

It wasn’t just interest rates.

According to a quarterly study released by the National Association of Realtors (NAR), the median price of a…

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"Apple to build even more at Austin campus"

Austin Business Journal reports, "the second phase of construction at Apple Inc.’s Northwest Austin campus shows no sign of slowing down as the tech titan files to raise yet another building on the property.

It's welcome news for a city — and real estate sector — that has been put at risk by big tech employers lately as recession fears loom and the work-from-home model prevails. Facebook (Nasdaq: META) is slimming down in Austin, backing out of space it was to take in Austin's next tallest skyscraper. News of coming layoffs at Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN) and Google Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOG) has left many real estate pros on pins and needles.

But Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) appears to be bucking that trend. Executives did not respond to requests for…

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"Santa Rita Ranch yet again ranks among best-selling neighborhoods"

Austin Business Journal reports, "Liberty Hill’s Santa Rita Ranch has claimed the title of top-selling master-planned community in the Austin area for the third consecutive year.

That distinction comes despite an overall drop in sales, according to Robert Charles Lesser & Co.’s 2022 list of the top selling master-planned communities nationwide. No other Austin-area neighborhood sold enough homes to rank in the country's top 50.

In all, 450 Santa Rita Ranch homes were sold in 2022. That was good enough for the development to top all rivals in the Austin area and secure the No. 32 spot nationally.

RCLCO has conducted a survey to identify the top-selling master planned communities since 1994.

According to Santa Rita Ranch developer Ed Horne,…

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"Austin renters see a tight squeeze with limited availability, says new report"

CultureMap Austin writes, "many looking to rent an apartment in Austin might be having a hard time — and for those wondering why, Rent Cafe offers an answer in its end-of-the-year report on Texas' most-competitive rental markets.

In Austin, renters are mainly staying put, renewing their leases into 2023. According to Rent Cafe, nearly 60 percent of renters and apartment dwellers opted to stay where they were. That's creating a tight squeeze for would-be renters; for every available apartment, there are, on average, 12 renters vying to live there.

Rent Cafe also indicates that apartments in Austin fill up within 30 days and the overall apartment market finds itself at about 95 percent occupancy.

That's great news for rental property owners,…

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"Apartment Rent Growth Set to Keep Slowing This Year"

Realtor.com reports, "the pandemic-fueled boom for multifamily building owners is fading fast going into 2023.

Apartment vacancies are piling up. The biggest wave of new rental buildings in nearly four decades is expected to cut the pace of rent growth across the country. Some in-demand Sunbelt cities are already experiencing rent declines, in part because many tenants and people searching for apartments feel they can’t devote any more of their income to rent.

Rising interest rates, meanwhile, make rental-property investments less profitable than one year ago when debt was cheap and hefty rent increases were taken for granted.

“We’re necessarily going to get a bit of a pullback,” said Thomas LaSalvia, senior economist at Moody’s Analytics.

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"Austin booms as the nation's fastest-growing office market in new report"

CultureMap Austin writes, "as we head into the new year, Austin's office market is headed for a big boom, according to one recent report.

Commercial real estate platform CommercialEdge has released its National Office Report, naming Austin the fastest-growing office market in the U.S., based on data through November 2022.

Austin "has been the fastest-growing office market in the country since the start of the pandemic," says CommercialEdge. And despite recent upheaval in the tech sector, including layoffs and office downsizing, the report shows office-using sectors of the labor market have added 85,000 jobs in Austin — a 28 percent increase, in the last 30 months.

To keep up with that growth, developers have added 3.1 million square feet of new…

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