Austin home sales slightly "chilled" with February numbers

Here are the February/2021 MLS single-family statistics for Austin, TX:

Home sales in our Austin metro area continued their epic performance in February that we’ve seen over the past 6-7 months.  What are 2 red categories doing there, you may ask, if we are continuing our ascent?  “Snowmageddon” in the middle of February, that’s why.  For the 1st 2 months of 2021 our sales are actually up by an average 6% and pendings only down 8% and I fully expect the 2 reds to be gone when March’s numbers come out next month.  Just look at the other 6 February categories, however:

• Listings were down a near-identical % last month at -76% (-78% in Jan) to a near-identical number of 964 (962 in Jan).  We simply cannot withstand this extremely low level of homes.  Consider this:  we had less than 1k homes for sale in our 5-county metro area of about 2.2M people for any size home and at any price point...simply remarkable.  If you’ve been thinking about selling your home, please contact me so I can show you just how easily we can sell it (ie-low hassle threshold for you) and how much you could net from the sale;
• Likewise, inventory dropped by double-digit percentages for our 8th month in a row and stood at only .50 months in February.  Consider that less than 6-months is considered a “sellers market” where sellers have an advantage over buyers;
• Both median (ie-half of the homes sold for more and half sold for less) and average sales prices also went up by double-digits for February for the 8th month in a row.  The average single-family home sales price in our Austin metro has exceeded $500k for the 2nd time in the last 3 months ;
• The average days on market (ie-the number of days active on the market before getting an executed sales contract) dropped below 30 days for the 1st time ever with only 28 days;
• Our Activity Index at 69% was the 2nd highest on record (only behind Jan/2021’s number of 75%).   The AI is a formula calculating the activity of pendings compared to listings (# of Pendings/#Listings + #Pendings) and has a maximum number of 100% so you can see just how hot our market is right now.  

Here are a couple of facts I found interesting about our national real estate market:

• The U.S. homeownership rate has only fluctuated slightly over the last 20 years, hitting a high of 69.1 percent in 2005 before ultimately settling back down at 65.8 percent during the fourth quarter of 2020

• The Post-COVID Boom has seen appreciation in the 25% to 30% range and inventory drop 70%.