Austin, Texas, is the Hottest Housing Market of 2021 – Here’s Why

There’s no denying the U.S. housing market is hot, and it has been for a few years, so prices just keep going up. Now, the folks at Yahoo Finance have named Austin, Texas, their hottest housing market for 2021.

“According to almost every real estate company that tracks home prices, no matter how you slice and dice the data, home prices in the capital city of Texas have soared, outpacing the nation,” Yahoo states in their year-end report.

Yahoo isn’t the only one. Zillow said it expected Austin would be the hottest city of 2021 earlier this year. Now, they’re taking it one step further, with Zillow saying that they believe the Austin metropolitan area will soon be the least affordable major metro area, not counting California. Austin is already more expensive than Boston, Miami, and even New York City.

“The Austin market has stood out and it’s because of the phenomenal shift in remote work, outperformance of tech industry and search for affordability,” Danielle Hale, economist at Realtor.com, told Yahoo Finance.

So, how much have prices gone up this year? In the Austin metro area, the median sales price of single-family homes went up 33.5% to $498,400 in the third quarter of 2021 compared to that same period in 2022. Across the national, the median home price went up of 16% for the same time period, reports the National Association of Realtors (NAR).

While Austin welcomed plenty of new residents due to COVID-19 and workers having more flexibility about where they could live, many people think Austin is just a hip place to live- and always has been.

“Austin was popular before COVID, it is a cool city,” Elizabeth Renter, NerdWallet’s data analyst, told Yahoo. “It would be topping the list of price increases and inventory decreases regardless of COVID, maybe not to this extreme.”