Ask anyone who has lived in Austin for more than a few years — the cost of living in the Capital City has changed a lot.to avoid the repetition of "years"

At the center of it all has been Austin's housing market, which has been on a roller coaster for the past several years. So, we dug through the numbers so you don't have to.
note on this graph above — I think it would be helpful to label the colors of the bars!
We compiled data from 2019-2023 — focusing on January, December, and the most expensive months in between — to show how much Austin's housing market has changed in the last half decade.

All of these statistics come from the Austin Board of Realtors and focus on Travis County. Let's take a deeper look into these numbers from the last five years.

2019

While the inventory in 2019 was much healthier than that of 2021 and 2020, it is still far from a healthy housing market inventory, which is six months.

January

Median price for a single family home: $334,400
Average time spent on the market: 64 days
Available inventory: 2 months

June

Median price for a single family home: $400,000
Average time spent on the market: 40 days
Available inventory: 2.5 months

December

Median price for a single family home: $369,000
Average time spent on the market: 51 days
Available inventory: 1.4 months

2020

Median home prices didn't start to jump substantially until months after the COVID-19 pandemic began, breaking the $400,000 mark in July. Plus, inventory stayed at 1.9 months or lower throughout the entire year.

January

Median price for a single family home: $351,000
Average time spent on the market: 56 days
Available inventory: 1.4 months

October

Median price for a single family home: $430,000
Average time spent on the market: 32 days
Available inventory: 1.2 months

December

Median price for a single family home: $435,000
Average time spent on the market: 36 days
Available inventory: 0.6 months

2021

Home prices saw a rapid rise in 2021, breaking the $500,000 mark in April. Year-over-year, the growth in price stayed above 20% or more. During this year, homes rarely stayed on the market for more than three weeks.

January

Median price for a single family home: $427,750
Average time spent on the market: 32 days
Available inventory: 0.5 months

June

Median price for a single family home: $560,000
Average time spent on the market: 13 days
Available inventory: 0.7 months

December

Median price for a single family home: $545,000
Average time spent on the market: 26 days
Available inventory: 0.5 months

2022

The most expensive year to date to buy a house in Austin, 2022 saw homes break a median price of $600,000 for five straight months. Although the first two months of the year only had 0.3 months of inventory, that number began to rise toward the end of the year.

January

Median price for a single family home: $550,000
Average time spent on the market: 30 days
Available inventory: 0.3 months

May

Median price for a single family home: $659,000
Average time spent on the market: 13 days
Available inventory: 1.2 months

December

Median price for a single family home: $520,000
Average time spent on the market: 61 days
Available inventory: 2.4 months

2023

After hitting historic highs, 2023 was the year the housing market started to stabilize.

January

Median price for a single family home: $499,274
Average time spent on the market: 67 days
Available inventory: 2.4 months

June

Median price for a single family home: $550,000
Average time spent on the market: 52 days
Available inventory: 4 months

December

Median price for a single family home: $527,500
Average time spent on the market: 80 days
Available inventory: 3.1 months

2024

This year, experts predict that 2024 will continue along the recovery process. Inventory has reached heights that haven't been seen in at least five years and home prices cooled for the first time in the same time frame. ABoR has yet to release any data for 2024, so only time will tell.