[Personal update why we’ve not published data for a while. A couple of months ago, I began work on obtaining sales data from the newly constructed buildings. Not a quick and easy task. However, after several conversations and a leap of faith by everyone involved in assembling the data (thanks!), we’ve got some REALLY interesting data to share. –Jude]
Back in 2010, when downtown Austin’s luxury condos started closing, the actual sales prices were closely guarded (not entered into the MLS). I’ve been publishing monthly sales of Downtown Austin condos for years, and began tracking sales of new construction condos by laboriously tracking new deed records. That data was [at least] an accurate count of how many new constructions units had closed, and what floor plans were selling best. That was real data my clients could rely upon, but actual closing prices were simply not available.
As a result, I have only been able to consistently highlight resale pricing. With all of my talk about the average sale price for downtown is solidly planted at $300 per foot, I would always qualify it as incomplete without closing price data for new condos.
My goal has always been to combine the resale numbers and the new construction numbers into a single statistic. The closely guarded luxury condo sales data has kept me from doing that.
Until now…
Back in June I got an email from one of the developers of these buildings. He said I wasn’t doing a very good job of articulating the pricing of the high end market. He was right. My challenge was I didn’t have his sales data, nor sales data from the other newly constructed buildings. So I replied “send me your sales numbers, and I’ll include it”. Of course, he wasn’t going to just handover his sales spreadsheets. After some back and forth we figured out a creative system, and he helped advocate this with the other developers.
The agreement I was able to negotiate was such that I would be “blind” to specific unit sales in any of the four buildings. The sales data for The Austonian, W Hotel Residences, Four Seasons, Spring Condos is delivered to me in aggregate, each month. For the past couple of months I’ve been collecting the combined 1) total closed units, 2) total gross sales, 3) total closed square feet.
Fortunately, for our purposes, the combined data for those four buildings is all that is needed to highlight downtown Austin’s two distinct condo markets, and resolve them into a single statistic. For as long as I have access to the data, I’ll share it with you.
For your enjoyment…
There are two markets for downtown Austin condos: one tier, the new luxury construction, is closing at an average of ~$600/ft. The other tier, resales, is closing at an average of ~$300/ft. We’ve got four months of new construction data. For the purposes of readability we’ll limit the historic resale data to 12 months.
You can see the gently positive trend line (red) for resale pricing. From September 2010 to September 2011, we calculate appreciation of 6% in average resale pricing.
NOTE: the numbers in the image below are average closing prices per foot.
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Very interesting. And I do agree with Carter that Spring is probably bringing down the average price.. Wow, that’s a high average $/square feet for new construction..
why is 360 not included?
Any 360 transactions would be resales. We track monthly resale average price per foot, which you can see above.
Wow, very interesting. My impression is Spring is selling for around $450/sq ft and they have sold a good number of units. That means the other projects which are higher end are even more than your averages since Spring’s numbers would bring down that average.