Austin Real Estate Market Update August 27, 2026 | Daily Briefing

Austin new construction and resale homes are moving at two completely different speeds this month, and the August 2026 numbers show exactly which suburbs sit on each side of that line.

The metro-wide Activity Index reads 19.4 percent today, which sounds like one market telling one story. It is not. New construction is running at 26.15 percent while resale sits at 16.69 percent, a gap of nearly ten full points. For anyone tracking Austin real estate, that divergence is the single most useful number in today's Austin market update, because it changes what almost every other metric means depending on which side of it you are standing on.

Here is what the Activity Index actually measures. It divides pending contracts by the sum of pending contracts plus active listings. It answers a simple question: of all the homes currently in play, what share have found a buyer? Across the entire MLS today that is 4,173 pendings against 17,337 actives, which produces 19.4 percent. A year ago the same calculation produced 19.8 percent, so the metro figure has slipped 1.8 percent year over year. That looks like modest softening. Underneath it, something more interesting is happening.

Scroll down to view the full Austin Daily Real Estate Briefing PDF for August 27, 2026.

New construction accounts for 4,543 of the 17,337 active listings, or 26.2 percent of supply. But new construction accounts for 1,609 of the 4,173 pending contracts, or 38.6 percent of demand. Builders are punching well above their weight. They control roughly a quarter of the shelf space and are capturing nearly four in ten contracts. Resale sellers hold 12,794 active listings and are capturing 2,564 pendings. That is the whole story in two lines.

The suburb-level data shows where this concentrates. Jarrell posts an all-inclusive Activity Index of 26.6 percent, which would look like one of the healthiest markets in the metro. Strip out new construction and the resale-only Activity Index for Jarrell drops to 15.85 percent, which lands in the contraction band. Elgin shows the same pattern, 26.0 percent all-in against 16.85 percent resale-only. Hutto reads 25.0 percent all-in and 16.38 percent resale-only. Kyle is 21.9 percent versus 15.22 percent. Liberty Hill is 22.4 percent versus 14.93 percent. In every one of these outer-ring markets, builder activity is doing the heavy lifting, and a resale seller competing against a builder in those towns is competing against incentives, rate buydowns, and a delivery calendar rather than against another homeowner.

Now look at the inner ring, where the gap nearly disappears. Cedar Park reads 21.4 percent all-in and 20.77 percent resale-only, a difference of about six tenths of a point. Lakeway is 22.4 percent versus 21.90 percent. Georgetown is 21.6 percent versus 20.41 percent. Austin proper is 18.3 percent versus 17.57 percent. In these markets, the demand showing up in the numbers is real resale demand from real buyers choosing existing homes. That is a fundamentally healthier signal than a headline number propped up by builder volume, and it is the distinction most Austin housing forecast commentary misses entirely.

Months of Inventory reinforces the same geography. Metro-wide inventory sits at 5.87 months against 6.17 a year ago, an improvement of 4.8 percent. But the range across cities is enormous. Cedar Park is the tightest market in the metro at 3.22 months, followed by Lakeway at 3.78, Round Rock at 4.16, Hutto at 4.15, Georgetown at 4.40, Kyle at 4.45, Austin at 4.53, and Leander at 4.54. At the other end, Dale sits at 18.67 months, Wimberley at 11.32, Spicewood at 9.66, Burnet at 9.40, and Smithville at 8.90. A buyer in Cedar Park and a buyer in Wimberley are shopping in markets that share a metro label and almost nothing else.

The year-over-year direction is also splitting by geography. Lakeway improved from 6.69 months last August to 3.78 now, a 43.4 percent tightening. Liberty Hill improved 28.8 percent, Lago Vista 26.2 percent, Smithville 19.1 percent, Leander 18.4 percent, Cedar Park 18.1 percent, and Austin 14.1 percent. Meanwhile Dale loosened 69.7 percent, Wimberley 69.1 percent, Manchaca 66.7 percent, Lockhart 58.4 percent, and Manor 39.1 percent. Fifteen of the thirty tracked cities improved and fifteen got looser, an even split that averages out to a flat metro headline while hiding two opposite trends.

Price tells a parallel story. The metro median sold price is $420,000, down $20,000 or 4.5 percent from last August, and down 23.64 percent from the May 2022 peak of $550,000. But at the city level, seven markets are up year over year on median sold price and twenty-two are down. Wimberley leads at plus 16.8 percent, followed by Burnet at plus 6.3 percent, Spicewood at plus 5.3 percent, Bastrop at plus 4.2 percent, Smithville at plus 3.7 percent, Cedar Park at plus 1.0 percent, and Austin at plus 0.2 percent. The declines are steepest in Marble Falls at negative 13.2 percent, San Marcos at negative 10.0 percent, Driftwood at negative 8.8 percent, and Cedar Creek at negative 8.5 percent. Buda is exactly flat.

Price cuts add a wrinkle worth understanding. Metro-wide, 55.6 percent of active listings have taken at least one reduction, 40.6 percent have held firm, and 3.3 percent have raised. The highest cut rates are in Cedar Park at 63.3 percent, Georgetown at 63.1 percent, Liberty Hill at 63.0 percent, Wimberley at 62.8 percent, and Kyle at 62.6 percent. Cedar Park having both the tightest inventory in the metro and the highest price-cut rate seems contradictory until you realize what a price cut actually signals there: sellers who priced ambitiously into a market that rewards correct pricing quickly. The lowest cut rates are Elgin at 46.7 percent, Burnet at 46.8 percent, and Jarrell at 47.8 percent, and those are precisely the builder-heavy markets, because builder concessions typically live off the list price line and never register as an MLS reduction at all.

Demand is the leading indicator here, and it is holding up better than the price data suggests. Cumulative pending contracts from January through August total 32,065, up 2.6 percent year over year and running 9.2 percent above the long-run average. Cumulative new listings over the same window total 36,792, down 2.7 percent year over year. Buyers are stepping forward at a slightly faster pace while sellers step back slightly, which is exactly the sequence that eventually relieves supply pressure. Closed sales, which lag by roughly thirty to forty-five days, confirm the earlier version of that demand: 22,215 homes have sold January through August, up 7.3 percent year over year and 14.1 percent above the historical average. Sold per thousand Realtors is up 12.7 percent.

A few honest caveats belong here. The August median of $420,000 is a partial-month figure taken on the twenty-seventh, and higher-priced homes tend to close in the first third of the month while more affordable homes close in the final ten days, so this number can still drift before the month closes. The year-to-date median of $422,926, down 2.1 percent from 2025, is the steadier price anchor. The August Absorption Rate and Market Flow Score readings in today's file are also incomplete-month values and should not be read as a collapse. July's complete-month readings of 18.7 percent absorption and a Market Flow Score of 5.40 are the last fully verified figures. And no part of this data supports calling a recovery. That requires four consecutive months of simultaneous year-over-year improvement across every core metric, and today's numbers do not clear that bar.

What does this mean practically? Buyers in outer-ring builder markets have genuine leverage and should be negotiating against builder incentives rather than accepting list price. Buyers in Cedar Park, Lakeway, Round Rock, and central Austin zip codes are shopping in tight conditions where correctly priced homes move. Sellers of resale homes in Jarrell, Elgin, Hutto, Kyle, and Liberty Hill need to price against the builder down the street, not against last year's comparable sale. Investors should note that sold-to-list is holding at 97.31 percent metro-wide and the sellers-per-buyer ratio sits at 2.6, which reads balanced. Agents should be running the resale-only Activity Index for any listing conversation in a builder-heavy suburb, because the all-inclusive number will mislead a client badly.

The Austin real estate forecast from here depends less on the metro headline than on which of these two markets a given property sits in. Anyone tracking Austin new construction versus resale in August 2026 should bookmark the Austin Daily Real Estate Briefing at teamprice.com/austin-daily-real-estate-briefing for the complete archive of daily market data, because this divergence has now persisted long enough to be a structural feature of Austin housing rather than a monthly quirk.

One metro, two markets, and the address decides which one you are in.