Update: The Million Dollar Austin Housing Market

The big Austin downtown condo question remains: how big is the market for million $ condo units in downtown Austin?Some new market stats from Ki Gray of Escapeso Austin Real Estate provide some context on the high-end downtown market and it’s performance so far in 2007.

Here are the number of houses that sold for $1 million or more by year and that were recorded in MLS in the Austin metropolitan area:

2004 – 152 houses
2005 – 213 houses
2006 – 341 houses
2007 – 181 houses (1st Half of 2007 Only)

The amazing thing is that the size of the market has more than doubled in just 3 years. As one of the fastest growing segments of the market, high-end inventory and demand have been rapidly expanding.

It remains to be seen how many high end condo units can be absorbed by the Austin market. In the Austonian alone, there will likely be more than 100 units priced over $1 million — that is a lot of inventory in one building. The project’s construction budget alone is greater than $1 million per unit which should provide an indication of the average unit selling price.

The good news for the high-end projects are that they are adding much needed downtown inventory in the fastest growing segment of the market. The bad news is that nobody knows how deep this market is — or how many units can reasonably be sold in any given year,