San Antonio’s housing inventory declined last month, bucking the national trend.
Listings in San Antonio dropped by 249 homes, or 1.6 percent, from a year ago, according to Homes.com. Among the top 40 metropolitan areas in the country, San Antonio’s only bedfellow was San Francisco, second from the bottom with 27 fewer listings than last August. Every other major city added homes to the market. To give a sense of scale, the country’s top city for housing abundance last month was Houston, where inventory swelled 22 percent to surpass 43,000 listings, a national record.
“It’s a strange position for a Sun Belt market like San Antonio to be in at the moment,” CoStar analyst Daniel Khalil said. “For San Antonio really to be the only major Sun Belt market to see a decrease year over year — it’s a small decrease, almost flat — I think that speaks to the resiliency of San Antonio as a market.”
San Antonio also clocked the highest rate of canceled home sales in the country earlier this year, when sellers were reluctant to adjust their expectations to the budding buyer’s market, local agents said.
Now it looks like sellers are deciding to wait.
“A lot of people have really good equity and really good rates on their property, so they’re just holding tight,” said Clint Neal, co-founder of San Antonio brokerage Neal and Neal.
Although buyers are wielding more negotiating power, San Antonio isn’t quite a buyer’s market, said Keller Williams of San Antonio president Grant Lopez.
“It feels to a lot of people like we’re in a down market. We’re actually not. We’re just back to our normal market that we always operated on,” Lopez said. “It’s like running on a treadmill: If you’re used to running five miles an hour, and you up it to ten for a good, long while — if you lower it down, it’s going to feel like you’re walking suddenly. But you’re not walking; you just had a long sprint.”
San Antonio prices have wavered marginally this year, with a median price of $265,000, according to Redfin.
North Texas, Houston and Austin have experienced larger price declines this year, Khalil said. The median sale price in Houston — about $336,000 — hasn’t turned positive year over year since April, aside from a brief period in the latter half of August when it was 1 percent higher, according to Redfin. Dallas has undergone a similar trend, with year-over-year declines stretching as far as 5 percent in May; at present, Dallas’ median price of $412,000 is 1 percent higher year over year. Austin’s median sale price, which stands at $440,000 now, trailed the previous year’s price between December and August. Other Sun Belt markets, such as Phoenix and Orlando, have modestly but definitely depreciated.
“We need this kind of stabilization to happen at a certain point, because it just can’t continue to rise and rise and rise,” Lopez said.
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