Luxe Austin Homes - buyer

5 Austin suburbs that unlock affordable homes for first-time buyers

Posted by Grossman & Jones Group on March 8th, 2022

Any hopes of ever buying an “affordable” house in the city of Austin are quickly fading, especially for first-time homebuyers.

In January 2022, the median sale price of a home within the city limits climbed to $550,000, up 20.9 percent from the same time a year earlier, according to the Austin Board of Realtors. Even the median sale price for the entire Austin metro area is increasingly out of reach for many first-time homebuyers — $476,000 in January 2022, up 30.4 percent from a year earlier.

However, some Austin suburbs enable first-time buyers to get more bang for the buck. While they might be a fair distance from Austin itself, a number of suburbs offer home prices at least $100,000 below the region’s median price.

In alphabetical order,…

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Zillow, facing big losses, quits flipping houses and will lay off a quarter of its staff.

Posted by Grossman & Jones Group on November 3rd, 2021

Zillow, the real estate website known for estimating house values, said on Tuesday that it would exit the business of rapidly buying and selling houses amid heavy losses and that it planned to let go about nearly 25 percent of its employees.

The announcement was a major strategic retreat and a black eye for Richard Barton, Zillow’s chief executive, who founded the company 16 years ago and has long talked about transitioning Zillow’s popular website into a marketplace. Last year, Mr. Barton predicted Zillow Offers, which made instant offers on homes in a practice known as iBuying, could generate $20 billion a year.

On Tuesday, Zillow, which said it has 8,000 employees, said the division had been the source of huge losses and had made the…

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