Our Splurge: Gregg Klar with Keller Williams Lake Travis has listed 5303 S. Scout Island Circle, Austin for $2.5 million.
Imagine a place where the weather is warm, the amenities are plentiful, and deep blue water views go on for miles. Itching to get away? What’s better than heading to your very own lakefront retreat? This week we zero in on two exceptional lakefront beauties in Austin.
This home on Deloache Avenue in the Sunnybrook Estates neighborhood of Old Preston Hollow is priced at $8.9 million, meaning that the neighborhood is likely one where the median home price is more than $1 million.
As home prices continue to rise, it’s not unusual to see homes that might have been $700,000 to $800,000 a few years ago suddenly come in at a healthy $1 million or more — all over the country.
A new Trulia report analyzed home values nationally and found that the share of single-family homes with $1 million or more asking prices has grown 7.6 percent in the last year alone, and has doubled since 2012. Homes valued at $1 million or more now make up almost 4 percent of all the homes on the market.
“Over the past year, as prices continued to rise, the median home value in more than 100 neighborhoods crossed into $1 million territory,” Felipe Chacón, a housing economist for Trulia’s Housing Economics Research Team, said. “More than 3,000,000 U.S. homes are currently worth $1 million or more.”
Trulia took a look at these million dollar neighborhoods — where rising home values mean that the median home value in a neighborhood is more than $1 million. The report looked at 15,100 neighborhoods, and 838 of them now fit in that category.
But where are those neighborhoods? In short, the bulk of them are not in Texas, which probably is one of the reasons that despite a robust market, you’re still seeing the state as an attractive place to relocate.
About two-thirds of these neighborhoods are in California, where 29 percent of all neighborhoods fit the bill. In San Francisco alone, only 15 neighborhoods have median home values that are below seven figures.
Financial site WalletHub ranked 182 of the largest U.S. cities to find the most stressful places in America, and found that Plano is the least stressed city in Texas. Houston was ranked the most stressful city in the state. Oh, and the sky is blue. These are things we already knew.
Based on data, WalletHub found the three most stressful cities in the U.S. were Detroit, Newark, and Cleveland. What makes a city stressful? Citywide factors you’d expect such as high rates of unemployment and underemployment, long commute times, and lack of affordable housing. There’s more personal factors that cause stress like personal bankruptcy, foreclosure, poor health, and divorce.
Then, there are the quirky factors that WalletHub evaluates like percentage of binge drinkers (yes, that’s you with your box wine-a-weekend habit), median credit score, obesity rates and share of adults getting inadequate sleep that make writing about WalletHub’s lists so interesting.
People in Plano report lower levels of stress at work, less financial woes, happier families and better health and safety than any other city in Texas, according to the July 2018 study. The new ranking comes after Plano was named one of the happiest places in the United States.
Sometimes we find great properties, and sometimes they are dropped in our laps — and this standalone condo in the planned community of Mueller is a latter instance.
Never heard of Mueller? Located about 11 miles from the Austin city center, the community is the best of both worlds — city services without the city taxes or the city ordinances (more on why that is key in the story). It is located on the 700-acre site that was vacated by the Robert Mueller Municipal Airport when it relocated to Austin in 1999.
Given its proximity to downtown Austin and the University of Texas campus, 4511 Graceful Lane #474 is the perfect spot for season-ticket holding Longhorn football (or basketball, or both, for that matter) fans who want a place they can relax on game weekends.
We have more details about Mueller and this great standalone condo over on SecondShelters.com.
3107 Brass Buttons Trail Austin, TX is listed for $999,900 by Jacque Krenek with Austin Area Properties.
A little birdie told me that a recent networking event in Austin was a huge hit, drawing top producers from all over the country who are raving about the city’s culture, cuisine, and nightlife in their Instagram feeds. Seeing all my real estate friends living it up in the state capitol got me thinking. What can I get for a million in Austin? From a lakefront darling on Brass Buttons Trail, to a Travis Heights stunner oozing flawless modern design, what I found may surprise you.
See these gems deep in the heart of Texas on SecondShelters.com now.
(Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons)
There may be a lot of apartments being built in Texas, but that’s not necessarily translating to more affordable rents, one economist said at a recent conference on affordable housing held at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.
Greg Willett, chief economist at RealPage, told the group assembled that the same affordable housing issues that have begun to block families from purchasing homes have begun to crop up in the rental sector as well.
“We are starting to see the same affordability challenges in rental housing,” he said, adding that this issue is occurring despite a boom in apartment completions across the country. (more…)
Is Dallas likely to get Amazon’s HQ2?
Right when you think that we’ve talked it absolutely to death, the Wall Street Journal had to go and breathe life into the corpse of the Amazon HQ2 story. But wait! Do all of these fancy pie charts mean what we think they mean? Is Dallas proper about to get the crown after finding ourselves at first runner up too many times?
According to the numbers (I’m not great at math, so I’m going to trust them a bit here), the big draw for Big D is all business — available labor, low taxes, and relatively affordable cost of living (for now, at least). Big points for meeting Amazon half way with college population and cultural fit (Dallas County is blue, y’all). But when it comes to fiscal health, we got low marks.
What would it take to get Amazon to locate it’s HQ2 here in Dallas? Jon Anderson says you don’t want to know, and we shouldn’t be so sure we want the e-retailer here anyway.
And according to new stats from ApartmentList, if Seattle’s fallout from HQ1 is any indication, Dallas and Austin renters should expect a bump in cost of living should Amazon HQ2 land in these major Texas metro areas.
