Luxe Austin Homes - rent

"Zillow says Austin’s housing market is now ‘ice cold,’ Austin Board of Realtors says no way"

KXAN Austin writes, "just days after the Austin Board of Realtors said the local housing market is starting to “rebalance,” Zillow has released a much harsher outlook: the Austin market is now “ice cold.”

The characterization comes as Zillow released its market report for December 2022.

The report shows homes in the Austin area are spending a median of 68 days on the market, more than in any other major metro nationwide. Back in December 2021, Zillow reported homes in the area were on the market for a median of 22 days.

Another metric in the report shows homes aren’t selling for as much as they used to. In November, just 11% of listings sold for higher than the asking price, down from 47% a year before.

That may be leading some homeowners…

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"Rents Are Still Rising—but Not By Much. Are the Steep Hikes Finally Over?"

Realtor.com writes, "the rent may still be too damn high, but at least it isn’t skyrocketing anymore.

That’s the message from the Realtor.com® monthly rental report, which shows a welcome cooling-off after the craziness of the COVID-19 pandemic period.

Rental prices in the largest metropolitan areas across the country rose 11.6% for the full year in 2022 but downshifted steadily throughout the year. By December, prices were only 3.2% higher, compared with the same month a year earlier.

Nationally, the median monthly rent was $1,712 in December—down $69 from the peak in July.

However, the national numbers mask enormous differences in metros around the country, where the locations people are moving to and from are reversing. And instead of…

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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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"Is the Rental Market Beginning To Normalize? Priced-Out Tenants Sure Hope So"

Realtor.com writes, "renters haven’t had much good news lately as landlords have jacked up monthly rents to previously unthinkable amounts across the country.

However, the rental market may be returning to something more seemingly normal. In September, the median monthly rent in the 50 largest U.S. metropolitan areas dropped for a second straight month, to $1,759, according to a recent report from Realtor.com®. That’s $12 lower than last month and a $22 drop from the peak in July.

Rents were still up 7.8% from September of last year. However, it’s the lowest year-over-year price increase since May 2021.

The report looked at apartments, condos, townhomes, and single-family homes advertised for rent in September on Realtor.com in the 50 largest…

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"It’s the perfect starter home. But it’s only for rent."

"Adam and Tahnya Gaston arrived in this Austin suburb in June with a toddler, a dog and enough money for a down payment. But within days they scrapped their plans for buying a house, deterred by soaring home prices and rising mortgage rates. Instead, they’re paying $4,000 a month to lease a three-story house in a new development aimed squarely at renters.

As the housing market sours, families around the country are eschewing homeownership and turning instead to new homes in rental-only developments such as the one where the Gastons landed. When completed, the Oaks on Chisholm Trail will have 113 stand-alone homes, each with a kitchen island, two-car garage and tiny plot of lawn — all exclusively for rent.

It’s one of…

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Austin company taking tiny home rentals to San Antonio

Austin-based Casata Corp., a developer of small home rental communities, is turning its gaze on San Antonio as it expands across the rest of Texas.

The company, founded in 2020 by developer Aaron Levy, is scouting five locations around San Antonio for a 200-unit community of built-to-rent homes with floor plans ranging between 400 and 800 square feet.

"We like cities where jobs are being created," Chief Operating Officer Zain Mahmood told San Antonio Business Journal.

The company also looks at the entertainment and shopping options nearby.

Mahmood, who was introduced to Levy through mutual friends and brought on as co-founder, said that when the group set up its pilot project, Casata Austin, the community was 82% leased before construction…

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Report: Average apartment rents in the Austin area have hit an all-time high

Average apartment rents for the Austin area have hit an all-time high, an expert told KVUE's media partners at the Austin American-Statesman.

Charles Heimsath has been tracking conditions in the area's real estate market since the early 1990s. He told the Statesman that between December and June, average rents jumped by their largest percentage ever in the time he's been tracking the market.

Heimsath said apartment rents in the area – which spans from Georgetown to San Marcos – increased, on average, 11.6% from December to June. He told the Statesman that he expected to see a slow down during the first half of the year, but that didn't happen.

"Rents continue to rise with no relief in sight," Heimsath said.

The…

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Are house prices going down?

After U.S. inflation cooled more than expected last month, you may be wondering whether or not the housing market is cooling off. The answer is yes — but with an asterisk.

The median sale price for a home in June 2022 was $428,400, an 11.2% increase since the same time last year. Even though this is a double-digit increase in prices, it’s also the smallest year-over-year increase “in nearly two years,” Redfin market analyst Tim Ellis says.

Data indicates that while U.S. home prices decreased 0.4% from June to July, other factors are still impacting home affordability. Even though home prices remain high, Ellis says the market is balancing out due to a variety of factors, including higher mortgage rates and decreased demand.

Redfin data shows…

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New-home market 'at a crossroads' amid uptick in canceled contracts, incentives

Homebuilders across the U.S. are shifting their strategies and financial outlooks amid changing consumer demand for housing.

But where the jury is still out is whether the trend toward elevated canceled contracts, more incentives and lower demand for housing is settling out to pre-pandemic levels — when demand for homes was still higher than historic norms — or will continue to worsen.

The nation's publicly traded homebuilders, in earnings calls reporting their most recent quarter's financial performance, are seeing similar trends and patterns across their portfolios as the housing market shifts amid higher interest rates and fears of a recession. The three-month period that ended in June is the first full quarter that illustrates how…

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Texas metros top ranking for apartment demand

As new residents continue to flood in, Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth, and Houston now have the highest apartment demand in the nation.

The largest Texas metros took the top three spots in a ranking of the increase in apartments needed to meet projected demand by 2035 in a study commissioned by the National Apartment Association and the National Multifamily Housing Council.

The study calculated the needed percentage growth in local rental stock as well as the absolute number of new apartments necessary to meet demand over the next 13 years. The combined weighted average ranked the Texas metros highest in projected rise in demand, according to the Austin Business Journal.

With a 2.6 percent growth rate and 117,107 new apartments needed to meet…

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