Today I had the opportunity to sit in on the Austin Mid Year Market Update presented by David Tandy. David is CEO of Texas National Title and a long-time student of the market. Twice a year he presents a market update for real estate professionals. It helps us better serve the Sellers and Buyers with whom we work.
In this video I pull David aside to ask a few questions about the Austin real estate market.
Q: Who is David Tandy and why should we listen to you?
“Well, I’m CEO, Texas National Title and just for my own company I spent a lot of time looking at what’s going on in the market overall and certainly in Austin just to help drive my company. I put together that information and I often share it with our customers, the Realtors.”
Q: How is the U. S. Economy right now?
“It’s just amazing how well it’s done. We are in the longest expansion phase that we’ve ever had. We’re now in our 10th year and going past that. Our unemployment rate in this country is down to 3% or 3.5% which is phenomenal. So we’ve experienced very good job growth and a very good long term expansion.”
Q: What I heard you say too is, a lot of economists out there are trying to predict the next recession. Should we be worried that this is the longest expansion ever?
“It’s just one of the things that’s interesting. There’s no time limit on expansions. Australia right now is in the 26th year, I think, of an expansion. They have not had a recession in 26 years. There’s no reason why we have to have one. Just because we’ve been in a long expansion, there needs to be something, some issue, some real reason that triggers a recession. And it’s just really hard to find right now what that reason would be.” – Austin Market Update
Q: So how is the Austin MSA economy?
“With all the announcements we’ve had over the last 12 months of the companies that are coming here…. building and expanding both from the Apple Announcement and Google’s announcement… Those are such big announcements and they represent a huge amount of jobs being created. I would tell you that we are very healthy… are at 2.6% unemployment rate, which is very low and just a lot of potential for more job growth and more population growth in Austin.” – Austin Market Update
Q: Okay, so for people that are thinking …they live here in Austin… and they’re thinking about maybe selling their home. What would you say to someone who’s thinking about selling their home?
“Well, certainly it’s a good time to sell. Especially from the standpoint that home prices have steadily increased, and there’s just a tremendous amount of demand out there. Right now, it is very much a Seller’s market in the sense that there are a lot of buyers wanting to buy and home values have suddenly increased. So that’s a good time in that sense.”
Q: So, buyers are paying more, but is there any silver lining for buyers?
“Well, certainly a year ago and a year and a half ago we all thought mortgage interest rates would be 5% right now. And, the last Freddie Mac survey last 30 Thursday came in at 3.75% as the average mortgage rate. So, what a great time to lock in a great fixed rate mortgage at a very low rate to buy home.”
