I sat in a conference room at ABoR headquarters last week on event hosted by AREAA and watched something you don't see often in this business: Vaike O'Grady market research advisor for Unlock MLS and Austin Board of Realtors put her own forecast up on the screen and graded it. Not a highlight reel. The actual call she made back in January, sitting right next to what actually happened.

Her mid-year closed sales call was 15,000 to 16,000. The real number came in at 15,698. On target. Her months-of-inventory call was 5.0 to 5.5; reality landed at 4.4 to 4.7, and she flagged her own number as too pessimistic. Her median price call was $410K to $425K, and the market came in at the high end of that range.

That kind of honesty is rare enough that it's worth mentioning before we get to a single statistic. When someone shows you where they were wrong, you can trust them more when they tell you where things are going.

So let's get to it.

The national picture is the ceiling on everything local

Before we talk about Austin, we have to talk about the weather system sitting over all of it.

Inflation is running at 3.4% year over year, with core at 2.5%. The U.S. added 162,000 nonfarm payroll jobs in August, unemployment is at 4.1%, and consumer confidence slipped to 89.4 from 90.2. The average 30-year fixed mortgage rate is sitting at 7.22%.

But the number that stopped me was this one: only 8% of consumers now expect their income to outpace inflation next year. That's down from 18% in late 2024.

⁠Read that again, because it changes how you should talk to people about buying a house. Buyers are not sitting on the sidelines waiting for a raise to rescue their budget. They've already concluded the raise isn't coming — or at least isn't coming fast enough to matter. They're planning around a budget that isn't growing as fast as prices are.

⁠Why this matters to you: if you're a buyer who's been telling yourself "I'll wait until I can afford more," the data says most of your competition has stopped waiting for that. And if you're a seller, it means your buyer pool is more payment-sensitive than it's been in years. Price is no longer the only lever — the monthly number is the conversation.

What's actually holding Austin up

Here's where it gets more interesting, because Central Texas has real structural support underneath the national headwinds.

Austin's household growth over the last decade ran +51%, against 13% nationally. The Austin–Round Rock–San Marcos metro added roughly 357,000 households in ten years, going from 703,976 to 1,061,155. That is the single clearest long-run demand signal for housing of every type you will ever see. More households formed means more first-time buyers, more move-up buyers, more renters converting to owners.

The job picture backs it up. The Austin metro added 23,800 jobs over the past year, a growth rate of 1.7%, with unemployment at 4.0% — consistently below both Texas and the U.S. The Austin Business-Cycle Index is running at +4.8% annualized. Venture capital raised year to date hit $6.5 billion, more than double 2025's $2.9 billion pace. And Austin now ranks 4th among the nation's top 50 metros for share of STEM jobs, up from 6th the year before.

Austin-Bergstrom moved 12.9 million passengers, up 4.6%.

Translation: the jobs landing here are higher-wage jobs, and the people filling them form households. That's the engine. It hasn't switched off.

The August numbers, straight

Now the part everyone wants. Here's the Austin–Round Rock–San Marcos MSA for August 2026:

• 2,501 homes sold — down 7.3% year over year
• $412,000 median sales price — down 6.4% year over year
• 2,623 pending sales — up 1.5% year over year
• 5.1 months of inventory — versus 5.5 a year ago
• 13,676 active listings — down 6.5%
• 3,579 new listings — down 7.0%
• 93.2% average close-to-list price — up from 92.2% a year ago
• $1.40B total dollar volume — down 11.1%

Look at the third bullet again. Pending sales rose while closed sales fell. That's been true almost all year, and it's the most underrated number in the report. People are still going under contract. The timeline from "we're looking" to "we closed" has stretched, and closings are lagging behind intent — but the intent is there.

And that close-to-list ratio going up while prices came down tells you something specific: sellers who price to the current market are still getting nearly what they ask. The pain is concentrated in listings priced to last year's comps.

County by county, it's not one story

• City of Austin: 844 sold (−10.3%), median $560,000 (−4.3%), 4.6 months
• Travis County: 1,111 sold (−9.5%), median $489,000 (−6.4%), 5.1 months
• Williamson County: 855 sold (−4.1%), median $399,900 (−5.9%), 4.6 months
• Hays County: 396 sold (−8.1%), median $355,000 (−1.4%), 5.5 months
• Bastrop County: 98 sold (−14.8%), median $342,495 (−5.1%), 7.4 months
• Caldwell County: 41 sold (+24.2%), median $270,000 (+17.4%), 7.3 months

Caldwell is the outlier worth watching. Small numbers, yes — 41 sales won't move a metro. But sales and prices both climbed while every other county in the MSA cooled. When affordability gets squeezed, demand goes looking for the edges. That's what the edge looks like on a spreadsheet.

Williamson County is the other one I'd flag. Only down 4.1% in sales and sitting at 4.6 months of inventory — that's the tightest supply in the metro alongside the City of Austin, with a median price $160,000 below it.

The pattern nobody in the room missed

One slide pulled from an analysis of every Central Texas downturn since 2000, and it laid out three things they all had in common:

1. Prices lagged. Sellers adjusted slower than buyers expected, and faster than sellers wanted.
2. Builders moved first. New construction repriced ahead of resale. Resale followed months later.
3. Jobs led the recovery. The turn started where employment landed.

Then the kicker: all three are happening right now.

I don't read that as a prediction, and I wouldn't sell it to a client as one. I read it as a reminder that what we're in has a shape, and that shape is familiar. This isn't uncharted water.

Resilient, not immune

The presenter closed Part Two with three takeaways I've been chewing on since:

Resilient, not immune. Higher rates mean fewer potential buyers — but positive pending sales and continued building activity show the market is still moving.

Normal ebbs and flows. The swings across counties, price bands and property types are typical of a market resetting. Not a market in trouble.

Guidance matters most right now. When the story varies by ZIP code and price band, a trusted professional is how clients turn data into a decision.

That third one is the whole job, and it's why I spend my Wednesday's in rooms like that one instead of reading a summary two weeks later.
What I'd actually do this week

Enough analysis. Here's the action list.

If you're selling in the next 90 days: pull your ZIP-level days-on-market number, not the metro average, before you set a price. Fifty-one percent of active resale listings in this market have already taken a price cut — and a reduction almost always costs more than the right list price would have. Price to the first 30 days.

If you're buying: ask what the builder's effective rate is this week in any neighborhood where you're also considering resale. Builders are repricing weekly and buying down rates in ways resale sellers usually aren't. Then ask what seller credit it would take on a resale home to match that payment. That single question changes the math on a lot of deals.

If you're on the fence: run the number on what waiting twelve months actually costs you, including rent. I'll get into why that math is shifting in a post later this week, but the short version is that the "just rent and wait" window is narrowing.

If you own and you're staying put: check your property tax assessment and your insurance renewal. Statewide property tax levies are up roughly 22% from 2021 to 2025, and Texas home insurance is up 60% since 2019 — twice the national rate. The cost of staying is climbing too.

One more thing

"The Austin market" is not one market. The gap between the fastest and slowest-selling ZIP code in this metro right now is 62 days. Same city, same month, wildly different realities — and the metro average describes almost nobody.

That's the post going up Monday, and it's the one I'd bookmark if you own or are shopping in a specific neighborhood.

Thinking about a move in Greater Austin, Manor, or anywhere in Central Texas? I pull this data every month and I read it at the ZIP level, not the headline level. If you want to know what it actually means for your street, your price band, and your timeline — reach out. I'll give you the real number, even when it isn't the one you were hoping for.
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⁠Disclosure: Roshan Budhathoki is a licensed Texas real estate agent and REALTOR® with Real International, serving Austin, Manor, Round Rock, Georgetown, Pflugerville, Kyle, Buda, Leander, Cedar Park and the greater Central Texas area. Texas Real Estate Commission License #757578. This article is provided for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, tax, financial, investment, appraisal, or lending advice. Market data referenced is drawn from Unlock MLS / Austin Board of REALTORS® research presented in September 2026 and reflects conditions as of the date of publication; market conditions change and individual results vary by property, ZIP code, and circumstance. Nothing here is a guarantee of future performance or a promise of any specific outcome. Please consult your own attorney, CPA, lender, or licensed advisor before making a real estate decision. Information deemed reliable but not guaranteed. Equal Housing Opportunity. TREC Information About Brokerage Services and Consumer Protection Notice available at roshanbudhathoki.com.