Below are the June 2007 and YTD mid-year real estate sales stats for Austin and surrounding areas. These are for single family homes, condos are not included.

The most interesting thing to me on the first chart below for June sales is that the median days on market is 28 days. That means half of all homes listed in the Austin MLS sell in less than 28 days. That's outstanding. The Average days on market for June was 56 days, which is also very good. Austin is really a city of many sub-markets, as the breakout by MLS area below shows. Some areas are experiencing strong demand and great appreciation while other parts of Austin (mainly surrounding suburbs to the east) are seeing slow sales and little or no appreciation due to a slowdown in starter home sales.

Overall, June sales saw the number of homes sold fall 11%, but the average prices keeps rising, with a 7.9% increase in average sold prices in Austin from $244,710 last year to $263,985 for June of this year. The Median sold prices rose 6.9% from $182,000 to $194,500. We're not far from our Median sales price moving above $200K for the first time ever. The average price per square foot increased 7.9% from $114 last year to $123 for June 2007. Days on market continues to decrease, meaning homes are selling faster than this time last year. Though not reported in the charts below, our inventory of available homes is increasing somewhat, but demand is keeping up in most areas.

Below is a year to date breakdown, again for the entire Austin MLS, single family homes. So far YTD Austin MLS sales prices are up 6.1% over the same period last year and the median sold price is up 5.7%.

Below is a YTD Sales breakdown, same as above, but with new homes eliminated. Average YTD appreciation for resale homes is 1% higher than the overall Austin MLS average, at 7.2%. Median price is almost flat, which tells me a lot of the median gain in the chart above is coming from new home sales in higher price ranges. Average and Median sales prices are lower also when new homes are removed from the stats.

Below is a breakout by MLS area. If you're not famiar with Austin's MLS areas, a map is at the bottom of the page. As usual, the areas closer in to Austin proper continue to see the biggest increases in sales prices. Areas in lower price ranges further out and east of Austin tend to have more sluggish markets. Hutto, Elgin and Manor are all seeing prices fall.

I want to go over the data fields listed below and explain why I show these particular sets of figures.

# Sold
This tells us if a particular area is experiencing a spike or drop in number sales. Scanning down the chart below, you'll see that almost all areas have a drop in number of sales, but there are several, mostly areas east of IH35, that have increased numbers of sales. Large increases in number of sales often indicate a lot of new home sales in that area.

Average Sold
This is the average sold price of all homes sold in an area. By itself, it doesn't tell the entire story. For example, Area HD (Dripping Springs) shows a 32% increase in average sales price, but that doesn't mean that a particular home in HD has appreciated 32%. That's not likely. In this case, there are several high priced sales for homes with acreage that pull the average up. But overall, HD is a very strong and growing area moving toward higher end homes. As you scan across the "Changes" line for area HD, you'll notice that all of the metrics are moving in the direction we want to see if we are looking for value appreciation.

Median Sold
Median sold prices are a good reality check against Average sold prices. Medians are less susceptible to swings caused by a few high or low sales, so movement of a median price in some ways tells us more about the broader direction of a market area than does the average.

Average SQFT (Square Feet)
This tells us the average size of the homes sold in an area. It's interesting to see how much the average size varies across areas, but we also divide sqft into the Average Sold price to get the average price per square foot.

Average Price per Square foot
This is another reality check against average sales prices. You'll notice for example in MLS Area 3E that the Average and Median sold prices are up about 14% and 17%, but the avg square footage has also increased and the average sold price per square foot is up only about 7%.

Average Days
This is Average Days on Market for homes that sold. Typically, a lower number of days on market should correlate with stronger sales numbers, but not always. Area HD from our example above has a high DOM of 90. This is largely due to a high number of new homes being listed, which typically remain active in the MLS for more days.

All of these pieces of data have to be viewed in the context of each other. Real Estate market data, especially as reported by newspaper writers, can be very misleading. In general, when looking at the data for a particular area, if I see low days on market, rising Average, Median and Per SQFT sales prices, then I think that area is probably doing ok. But there can be specific neighborhoods with a strong area that go counter to the area overall. This can be due to factors such as the quality of schools, quality of construction, traffic issues, etc.

OK, on to the numbers below. As usual, post any questions/comments and I'll do my best to answer.