Austin, Texas, has emerged as one of the nation’s most pronounced buyer’s markets. The data suggests the shift is no longer a blip.
Redfin data reveals year-over-year price declines across all of Texas’s major metros, including Austin, swaths of Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston and San Antonio, in a correction that shows little sign of reversing. Despite a promising start this year, spring has failed to deliver the seasonal momentum sellers were counting on.
The reversal is particularly striking in Austin, which spent the pandemic era as the poster child of America’s remote-work housing frenzy. Flush with tech transplants and newly untethered workers, the city watched demand surge and prices shatter records for the better part of three years.
Now, the hangover has set in. Inventory is building, prices have pulled back meaningfully from their peak and affordability — long a flashpoint for residents priced out of their own city — is finally showing signs of relief.
For Austin’s real estate agents, the market correction is a reset. It’s rewarding those with sharp skills while squeezing out the part-timers who rode the pandemic boom without building a true business.
Across the country, the markets like Austin that ran hottest during the pandemic are now cooling the fastest, and the days of simply planting a sign and waiting for offers are over.
‘Buyers are so reactive to interest rates’
Cynthia Mattiza, an Austin, Texas-based Realtor at Kuper Sotheby’s International Realty, said Austin has certainly experienced a market cooldown compared to the COVID era.
Cynthia Mattiza
“It went from red hot to pretty cool quickly,” Mattiza told Inman. “In the hyper-local market that I work in, which is Lake Travis, West Austin, it’s been a buyer’s market for a while. If priced well, it will move, but there is so much inventory for buyers to choose from, and they are definitely pickier with their selections.”
She said she recently had a listing where a seller was open to a contingency offer, and accepted a contract $50,000 under asking just to get a deal done. The buyer ultimately changed their mind, but the seller was open to a deal on those terms.
“The large supply certainly affects buyer sentiment,” Mattiza said. “We know that supply and demand affect buyer behavior. In the market I serve, we have about a four- to six-month supply, and in some neighborhoods it’s higher. While this may appear to be balanced, it still very much feels like a buyer’s market.”
She said affordability is one of the primary factors cooling buyer demand in Austin. “This is a crisis in our city,” she said. “There are many dialogues with city officials about affordability and what can be done. Over the years, new construction has kept up, and there’s a good amount of supply in the suburban markets.”
Elevated interest rates, the ongoing war in Iran and broader economic uncertainty have also been major factors in cooling buyer demand in Austin this year. “We saw a peak of activity in January and early February, but as the war in the Middle East began, it started to cool down,” Mattiza said. “Buyers are so reactive to interest rates, so anytime there is a drop, we see an increase in buyer activity.”
Only the strongest survive
Mattiza said she represents many sellers in West Austin, and in each neighborhood, they have sufficient inventory to compete. She has received lowball offers from buyers and sellers who are unable to close the price gap.
She points to one offer on a property where the buyer changed their mind during the option period. While she said it is normal and does happen, the number of contracts falling through is higher than in 2021-2022.
“In this shift, it does feel harder to get deals put together,” Mattiza said. “There isn’t as much urgency with buyers, so keeping deals alive requires finesse and constant communication with buyers’ agents.”
Mattiza’s market may currently be challenging, but she has been an agent in Austin for over 16 years and has been through tough cycles before. For her, what has changed is the resilience she has built to get through the hard times.
“I know it’s not forever, so I just keep grinding, maintain constant communication with my clients on how we are serving and keep them informed of the market to set proper expectations,” she said.
Mattiza believes the agents who entered the market in 2021 or 2022 are the ones experiencing the biggest hurdles. “They only know when it was easy to get a deal together,” she said. “In this cool market, it definitely takes more creativity, more patience, and special finesse in managing the highs and lows of client emotions.”
Texas saw a massive influx of new licensees during the boom. A correction typically flushes out part-time and transactional agents, which ultimately benefits experienced professionals, like Mattiza, who can weather the slower market.
The exodus shows up in data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. As interest rates climbed and transactions dried up, the pace of real estate salespeople upgrading to broker licenses, a traditional marker of career commitment, collapsed from a peak of 800 per quarter in 2022 to fewer than 400 by early 2025. The 50 percent drop signals a profession quietly shedding the people who were never in it for the long haul.
Mattiza said it’s been tough to remain resilient, but it’s “what we do to survive these down markets.”
“Austin is such a strong, influential city with so much potential that we are confident we are on the upswing,” she said. “We just need to work on the basics of serving our clients with the utmost professionalism and power through it.”
‘They actually have to sell it again now’
Ben Mizes is president of Clever Real Estate and also works as a real estate agent. He works with agents across Texas and Arizona and evaluates transaction data from thousands of deals nationwide. He offered a complimentary take on Mattiza’s experience.
Ben Mizes
Mizes said that in many hot Sunbelt markets in 2021 and 2022, buyers won bidding wars by forfeiting contingencies. “They would do this within days of the listing going live. Now, buying is a slower and more cautious experience,” Mizes told Inman. “Buyers are still aggressive but more sensitive to price. Sellers are still clinging to the idea that prices will return to 2021 levels.”
The result, according to Mizes, is that many homes in these markets now sit on the market 2 to 3 times longer than the 2021 average.
“Weeks go by, and listings receive just a single offer in many instances, ending the days of multiple offers,” Mizes said.
As Mizes mentioned, sellers in Austin and other pandemic-era hot markets may often still have pandemic-era price expectations baked in. The hardest part of a listing agent’s job right now is the pricing consultation, convincing a seller that the market has moved without losing the listing to an agent who overprices it to win the business.
While affordability remains a major challenge, Mizes said buyers in markets like Austin, Texas, can do things that were “impossible during the boom.”
“They can negotiate lower prices and home repairs,” he said. “This was unheard of during the boom.”
This has made agents’ jobs in these markets very different — and more challenging — than they were during the pandemic. Selling in a market like Austin requires more tactics and much more skill, Mizes said. But this means top agents are differentiating themselves and proving their worth.
“Before, agents would just post a listing, and it would sell itself,” Mizes said. “They actually have to sell it again now.”