Austin Market has truly gone to **** (Round Rock, Georgetown: fit in, short sale, 2013)

[Angelfan760]

Originally Posted by Dub D

The biggest draw in California are the beaches and weather!? You sure? And companies are moving to Texas because it's cheaper? Someone get this guy a book deal!


It's 100 miles from Big Bear to the nearest Orange County beach. Google it. Says it'd take 2 hours and 11 minutes right now. Simple math, if you drove 60 mph that would take you 100 minutes. Not sure what year you did said trips but now there's traffic in both directions and on the weekends.

You drive 60mph on I-15 at 6am in the morning??? I said weather and coastal real estate. Yes the beaches are nice, but coastal real estate is a "can't miss". Rents on coastal real estate have not dipped in 60 plus years. When I say coastal, I mean less than 5 miles from the beach. In regards to the point about the companies moving here you are missing the underlying meaning. In short maybe I am bias, but everyone I know who has done very well for themselves, succeeded through real estate or equity in a start-up company. IMO It is really hard to get ahead as a new hire at a company like Tesla, Oracle, etc.. unless you have a very specialized degree with a lot of education. On the real estate side the best advice I have ever received is you make money on the purchase not the sell. Anyone buying right now is in an extremely disadvantaged bargaining position, hence why they call it a sellers market.

Once again, this is my opinion but we just went through one the roughest years ever, people are acting irrationally.(i.e waiving inspections, appraisals) etc.. kind like when a girl has a break up and goes and makes drastic hair change but doing so with an investment that for most is the most important one in their life.

[Need4Camaro]

Originally Posted by cheeva

Feeling about McCoy lumber? ambivalent. It's not Tesla, IBM, Samsung, Visa, Schwab, Apple, Google, Dell or Facebook, but it will do.

Speaking as someone who has worked for about 3 of those companies...

...It may not be those big tech corporations but it shouldn’t be discredited just because it’s not a high end company. Lower income earners =/= ghetto or lesser importance, the biggest determining factor in that is individualistic character. Generalization on so many levels is tearing this country apart. Look at what is happening in SF after it priced out all of the service class workers. All fields of work have their respective place and importance regardless of what ones salary may be.

[cheeva]

Originally Posted by CarnivalGal

And don't forget the teachers and police officers and other "ghetto" people who have been priced out of Austin.

Teachers and firefighters wear XXL T-shirts and have face tattoos? You are confusing them with the ghetto people I was talking about earlier.

[ashbeeigh]

Originally Posted by cheeva

Feeling about McCoy lumber? ambivalent. It's not Tesla, IBM, Samsung, Visa, Schwab, Apple, Google, Dell or Facebook, but it will do.

It seems like you’re only associating income with technology. There are other industries that have executives and influence in the community. This company provides lots of support to the central texas area. Again, income in bit exclusive to tech. Oil, lumber, even education are other ways to make a higher income. These are just industries I’m aware of. I’m sure there’s others.

[ashbeeigh]

Originally Posted by cheeva

Teachers and firefighters wear XXL T-shirts and have face tattoos? You are confusing them with the ghetto people I was talking about earlier.

I think the point she’s making is that Kyle ISN’T ghetto.

[ashbeeigh]

This is more reasonable and will be gone if it isn’t already. https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/3...ource=txtshare

[10scoachrick]

Seems we aren't the only ones:


https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/29/succe...=pocket-newtab

[AMJ27]

Originally Posted by Taynxtlvl

Many of the younger millennials are sitting back and waiting for a bubble burst. Austin is a fine city. But as of right now. These houses are horribly overvalued. One thing about California is that it's pricey but you can literally ski on top of a mountain and swim in the ocean like two to three hours later by car. So it's worth it. Here as pretty as it is. Not so much.

Good luck with that. Younger millennials might be too young to have experienced when the housing bubble did burst in 2008. This doesn't feel the same to this Gen X who lived through it as a homeowner in a state that was significantly impacted by it all. After we moved here, we laughed when our Austin neighbors whined about their homes not appreciating at all during the housing crisis a couple of years before. Try watching all of the homes in your neighborhood losing 50% of their value and your nice middle class community being riddled with short sales and foreclosures. Your choice was to stay put and cross your fingers that you weren't in situation where you had to move (job loss, job change) or get out via a short sale/foreclosure because you needed to move for whatever desperate reason and you owed $100,000 more on your home than what you could sell it for. People with the means were writing checks and paying out of pocket to sell their homes to avoid the ramifications of a short sale. We had been in our house for a while and had more than average equity which allowed for us to not be underwater with our mortgage, but we were the exception. It's actually why we were able to sell our home because we were one of the few that weren't a short sale (which buyers were avoiding because it was such a mess to buy a distressed sale).

This situation doesn't feel the same at all. Lending practices are different and the demand for homes, at least in my neighborhood, seems to be the result of population expansion in our city not because of shell game being played in the real estate market. Pre 2008, it felt like more of a hobby with people buying homes with ARM loans that they'd live in a year or two before selling to cash out their equity and move to another bigger home in a neighborhood down the street. People were also getting approved for mortgages that they couldn't afford and aggressively refinancing. I worked with a woman who had some deal with her original lender where they could refinance for free and she was refinancing every 6 months. She loved it because it meant she wouldn't have a mortgage payment for a month, and this was a highly educated professional woman making six figures married to someone with an equally lucrative career.

The current scenario here with the housing market does not feel like the games that were played leading up to the previous housing crisis. People have been saying we've been in a bubble for 6 or 7 years as the homes have been appreciating rapidly and worried that they've overpaid for their homes. Meanwhile, their homes have doubled in value. I think in a worst case scenario, Austin will experience a stagnation in home prices similar to what Austin experienced in the 2008 housing crisis opposed to a bubble bursting, but I'm not even sure if that will happen considering the continued population growth in Austin. In a nightmare scenario, I could see the bubble bursting a little more if all the sudden Austin fell out of favor as a place where companies and people want to move to, but even if that happened I don't think it would be an immediate deflation like we saw in 2008.

[ScoPro]

Originally Posted by va_residents

My home insurance on DC home ($650k) was only $490/year. TX home insurance is too high.

Do they get tornados, hurricanes, & hail storms like we do?

[AMJ27]

Originally Posted by Dub D

A 700k home in California and 700k in Texas is very different when it comes to monthly payment due to the higher property tax and home insurance in Texas.

I'm taking my third trip to Austin this weekend just to confirm everything regarding moving there in the next month or two. I can afford a really good house in Round Rock or Cedar Park or a condo in San Diego for the same monthly amount. However, the max price I can qualify for is 100k more in California. The TX property tax vs CA state tax is almost a moot point but the home insurance difference is gigantic.

We were really surprised at how much more expensive home owners insurance was in TX when we moved here in 2010. Our policy was triple what we paid before for a solid policy with a small ($250 or $500...can't remember) deductible. Most policies here have a 1% of your home deductible. Utility prices were also higher in TX, especially water. Definitely something to keep in mind when moving here.