Sometimes the headlines write themselves…👆🏼
According to the latest numbers from the Texas Real Estate Research Center at Texas A&M University, the average price per acre in the Austin-Waco-Hill Country market reached $5,290 in the third quarter, up 30% year over year. Almost 60% more acreage changed hands last quarter than in Q3 2020.
Rising land prices mean higher overhead for new housing, a significant factor in rising home prices in the Austin area. In October, the median house in the metro cost $455,000, according to the Austin Board of Realtors. At the same time, the need for new housing was extreme, as the area had only one month of inventory. This is a far cry from a healthy market’s inventory of six months. — emphasis added
There is no affordable housing without affordable land. Those high land prices reward speculators and investors, as the headline makes clear. There is no way housing developers can build their way out of a hole that deep. The solution to this was understood 150 years ago and further back. But those who still stand to make money from the scarcity of land and are willing to pocket the unearned increment, the dividends of other peoples’ investment, will resist that solution.