Austin Real Estate Market Update August 10, 2026 | Daily Briefing

For the first time in this correction, the question of how many homes are for sale in Austin has a different kind of answer, because the number stopped going up. There are 17,567 active residential listings across the Austin metro market as of August 10, 2026. A year ago on the same date there were 17,609. That is a difference of 42 homes, or 0.24 percent. In a market that spent three straight years watching inventory pile higher every summer, a flat reading is genuinely new information, and it is the single most useful data point in today's austin market update. Active listings now sit 579 below the June 30, 2025 peak of 18,146, which remains the highest active count in the modern history of this market.

Scroll down to view the full Austin Daily Real Estate Briefing PDF for August 10, 2026.

The reason that matters has less to do with the listing count itself and more to do with what is happening on the other side of the ledger. Cumulative new listings from January through July total 33,511, which is down 1.4 percent from last year, though still 25.1 percent above the long-run average. Cumulative pending contracts over the same seven months total 29,206, up 6.1 percent year over year and 13.1 percent above average. Sellers brought slightly fewer homes to market, buyers signed meaningfully more contracts, and the gap between the two narrowed. That year-to-date gap now stands at 4,305 listings, down from 6,470 at this point in 2025. The oversupply is still real, but it shrank by roughly a third in a single year.

Months of Inventory reflects that shift directly. The metro figure is 5.96 for 2026 against 6.29 for 2025, an improvement of 5.3 percent. The live snapshot calculation on today's inventory reads 5.21. Either way, Austin is holding less standing supply relative to its sales pace than it did last summer. The city-level table is even clearer. Comparing August 2025 to August 2026, 19 of 30 tracked cities, or 63.3 percent, now carry lower Months of Inventory than a year ago. Lakeway improved 43.7 percent, Lago Vista 38.5 percent, Cedar Creek 38.1 percent, and Liberty Hill 35.2 percent. On the other side, Lockhart is up 51 percent, Wimberley up 43.4 percent, and Manor up 27.7 percent. Supply is not tightening everywhere. It is tightening in specific places, and those places tend to be the inner ring and the established lake communities rather than the far outer edge.

The New Listing to Pending Ratio sits at 0.72, meaning roughly seven new contracts are signed for every ten new listings that hit the market. That is not a balanced number and it has not been balanced since 2021, but it is stable rather than deteriorating. The 2026 monthly readings have moved in a narrow band between 0.71 and 0.80 all year, which is the picture of a market that found a floor rather than one still falling.

Demand itself is the piece that has not caught up. Today's pending snapshot shows 4,065 contracts, down 5.02 percent from 4,280 a year ago. Because pending sales are a leading indicator and sold prices are a lagging one, that negative snapshot deserves weight. It does not cancel out the 6.1 percent year-to-date gain, but it does say that the current week is running softer than last year's equivalent week. The Activity Index tells a similar story at 18.8 percent versus 19.6 percent last August, a decline of 3.9 percent. This is the case where the Activity Index can fall even when cumulative contracts rise, because the calculation compares pendings against a much larger active pool.

The split underneath that number is worth understanding for anyone weighing an austin housing forecast. New construction carries an Activity Index of 24.53 percent while resale sits at 16.62 percent. New construction accounts for 4,476 of the 17,567 active listings but 1,455 of the 4,065 pendings, which means builders hold about a quarter of the supply and are capturing more than a third of the contracts. Builder incentives continue to pull buyers away from resale sellers who cannot match rate buydowns. On the resale side alone, 14 of 30 cities score below 15 percent, which is the Crisis and Freeze band, and 10 more sit in the Contraction band between 15 and 20 percent. No city reaches Expansion.

Price data confirms that sellers are still carrying the adjustment. Across all active listings, 55.2 percent have taken at least one price reduction. The July median sold price closed at $435,000, up 1.2 percent year over year, and the average landed at $586,651, up 2.9 percent. Those are the first positive monthly comparisons in a while, but a single month is not a trend, and monthly medians are distorted by closing timing, since higher priced homes tend to close in the first third of the month and more affordable homes cluster in the final ten days. The year-to-date median of $424,118 is the number to anchor on. Measured against the May 2022 peak of $550,000, the median remains 20.91 percent below, a gap of $115,000, and the projection model puts a return to that peak around November 2031 at a 4.648 percent compound appreciation rate.

Sales volume is the quiet bright spot. Cumulative sold properties from January through July total 19,334, up 7.7 percent year over year and 15.6 percent above the long-run average. July alone recorded 2,904 closings, up 8.6 percent from July 2025. Sold per thousand Realtors rose 13.3 percent, which means the average agent in this market is closing more transactions than a year ago even though total agent count pressure remains. The absorption rate reads 18.30 percent, well under the 31.27 percent historical average but improved from 16.4 percent last July. The Market Flow Score finished July at 5.18 against 4.56 in July 2025, extending year-over-year improvement to six consecutive months from February through July. That is a real streak and it is worth watching, but it is not a recovery declaration. Our standard requires four consecutive months of simultaneous improvement across all core metrics, and the year-to-date median price and the current pending snapshot have not cleared that bar.

For buyers, this is still a market with 2.3 sellers for every buyer and more than half of listings discounted, so leverage remains available, particularly in Manor, Bastrop, Elgin, and San Marcos where supply is heaviest. For sellers, the flat inventory reading is the first structural piece of good news in two years, but pricing correctly at the outset still beats chasing the market down. For investors, the narrowing supply gap paired with rising absorption is the setup worth modeling. For agents, the volume story is the one to bring to listing appointments. Readers can find the Austin Daily Real Estate Briefing at teamprice.com/austin-daily-real-estate-briefing for the complete archive of daily market data, including every prior reading behind these trends. The honest answer to how many homes are for sale in Austin in August 2026 is 17,567, and the more useful answer is that the number finally stopped climbing.