June Downtown Condo Sales: Mediocre

We’ve crunched the numbers and updated the AustinTowers | TOWERS Realty Downtown Austin Condo Market Index fro June, 2009 and the results are amazingly unremarkable.

In the month of June, only 8 downtown Austin condo units were transacted on the MLS with all the key metrics showing market stress. While the units were bigger, newer, and more expensive than the units sold in any month in recent history, the $ / SF dropped 3% and the % of ask dropped from 98% to 87% — a big drop. Average Days on Market soared from 60 to 117 days.

While June sales show market weakness, the results also show the weakness of the MLS. While 8 units sold through MLS, approximately 15 units went under contract at the Shore alone, all of which were being transacted outside of the MLS. Over the last year, the MLS records a total of 94 downtown sales while we know that more than 400 units were sold at 360 alone. So while the MLS numbers show a surprisingly small transaction volume, it is difficult to know whether sales were weakening or whether the most recent sales were simply closed off MLS.

Interestingly, 3 of the 8 units sold on the MLS were in Milago. Looking at the last 10 Milago transactions, the average price has settled in at $286 / square foot. The 3 June Milago units were all under 1,000 square feet while the other 5 units sold were all over 1,000 square feet. Two June transactions were for units larger than 2,000 square feet — very large by downtown Austin standards.