Steiner Ranch Housing Report - April 2022

The ​median price of a home in Steiner Ranch in March was the highest I've seen, but I don't think it's a true representation of the full picture.  Watch this month's installment of "How's the Market in Steiner Ranch," to ​find out why I think it's off. If you'd prefer to review the monthly stats in text or table format, they can be found below the video.

If you are looking to buy or sell a home in Steiner Ranch, contact me via email or at 512-650-7300. Previous editions of How’s the Market in Steiner Ranch are also available.  If you prefer to read instead of watch, here are the chart and transcript.

Greetings!  I'm Craig Smyser with 1835 Realty.  Welcome to the April 2022 edition of "How's the Market in Steiner Ranch.”  The real estate market continues it’s torrid pace, so let’s jump right in.

In March, 18 resale homes closed in Steiner Ranch which was down 21.7% from March 2021.  The number is down only because we have so few homes available to sell.  In fact, the number of new listings put on the market in March was just 26, down 33.3% from the 39 last March.  If you have any thoughts of selling, please contact me soon so we can discuss the current market conditions and find out what is the right time for you to sell. The median price in March increased a humongous 70.8% to $1,212,500.  The average price of a home increased 40.1% to $1,227,055.  The average price per square foot increased by 28.4% to $350.29.  These numbers are unbelievable especially when you consider the strength of the market last March.  But let me offer a bit of perspective.  As I look across the homes that sold in March, they skew towards the higher end neighborhoods and are larger than the average sale.  So while it makes a great one-month stat, we aren’t yet to the point that the median home in Steiner is worth over $1 million.   This is a great reason that I like to look at a longer time frame to see how the stats look in that light – but even these will need an explanation.  The number of resale homes sold during the past six months is 88, down 24.1% from this same time frame the year prior.  The median price of a home has increased 22.1% to $820,000.  The average price increased by 28.6% to $980,610.  The average price per square foot increased 33.7% to $304.56.  While the one-month numbers overstated the market because there were more high-end homes that sold, the six-month numbers understate them because of timing. The market from October to December was the quietest we saw over the past 15 months, but January to March were much stronger.  So the $820,000 median price I believe is under what we are really seeing in today’s market when looking across at Steiner as a whole.

The number of available resale homes at the end of March was 12, the same as last March.  Across Steiner, the March sales ranged from a low of $731,000 to a high of $2,300,000.   The average sales price to list price ratio was 107.3% and for homes that closed in March, the average days on market was 18.  And the reason that 18 is so high is because our friends at Opendoor had a house on the market for 198 days before it sold, thus skewing this number quite a bit.  If we take that house out, the average was 7.

So the elephant in the room that I haven’t addressed is risin interest rates.  They have risen fast over the last couple of months and, as I record this, are just about at 5% for a 30-year home loan.  For younger folks, this seems high.  For those of us who’ve been buying homes for a while, this is still a great historical number.  But, rising so quickly, these new interest rates are bound to impact the market.  Certainly, the buying power is diminished.  Someone looking in the $800,000 to $900,000 range may now be in the $750,000 to $850,000 range.  But they’ll still buy a home.  Personally, I think the enormous demand for homes right now, will prevail over the rising interest rates and we will continue to see an imbalance of buyers to sellers causing prices to rise, though not as fast as we’ve seen them.  There are of course, other factors involved, but I don’t think the jump in rates will be a major deterrent.

Property tax appraisals will be released soon.  The values will be huge.  If you have a homestead exemption, you’ll at least have the 10% cap.  If you bought your home in 2021, you’ll see a giant increase.  As usual, I’ll be holding my annual workshops on How to Protest Your Property Tax Appraisal.  Once Travis Central Appraisal District releases the valuations, I’ll schedule a few workshops and they’ll be done by Zoom again this year.

I don’t have time to address it this time because this is already a long video, but soon I will address concerns I have about the rising home values and how they impact the tax appraisal, the tax rates, and the overall tax bills.

If you have any real estate related questions, please don’t hesitate to call or text me at 512-650-7300 or email me at [email protected].  Thanks for watching “How’s The Market in Steiner Ranch.

Statistics based upon information from ACTRIS for the periods cited.