Today I had the opportunity to attend the press announcement at the Austin Public Library unveiling Airbnb’s new Housing Accelerator, a $250 million initiative designed to help get stalled housing projects off the ground across the country.

And appropriately enough, the very first investment is happening right here in Austin.
Airbnb is committing $6.4 million to help finance 201 affordable homes as part of the redevelopment of the former Home Depot and car dealership site in Austin’s St. John neighborhood. The larger redevelopment is expected to ultimately include more than 500 homes, along with retail, park space and public art.

For anyone who follows Austin real estate, the announcement touches on several issues we’ve been talking about for years: housing affordability, the cost of development, our shortage of housing, the role of short-term rentals and, increasingly, the question of why projects that have already been approved still struggle to actually get built.

What Is Airbnb’s Housing Accelerator?
Airbnb is starting the program with a $250 million investment pool intended primarily to provide gap financing for multifamily housing developments.

Basically, these aren’t necessarily projects that don't make sense or don't have financing. They’re projects that are often almost financially viable but have a remaining gap preventing construction from moving forward. That distinction matters.

The economics of building housing have become substantially more difficult over the past several years. Higher interest rates, construction costs and other expenses can create a funding gap even after a developer has assembled most of the capital needed for a project. Affordable housing can be particularly challenging because developers can’t simply raise rents enough to compensate for higher costs.

Airbnb plans to invest at below-market returns and says it will prioritize affordable and mixed-income developments. The company estimates its initial $250 million commitment could ultimately help unlock more than $5 billion in total housing investment over the next decade.

The Austin investment is the first test of that model.

So, why Austin?
I actually think Austin is an interesting, and logical place to start. We spent much of the last decade talking about Austin as one of the fastest-growing cities in America. Then the market shifted. Interest rates rose, rents declined from their pandemic-era highs and suddenly projects that may have penciled a few years ago became significantly harder to finance.

At the same time, Austin has made some substantial changes to its land-use policies in an attempt to allow more housing to be built.

That combination makes Austin a useful case study: we have significant housing demand over the long term, we've started removing some of the regulatory barriers to creating additional supply, but financing can still determine whether a project actually gets built.
The St. John project is a particularly interesting example. The City purchased the roughly 20-acre property more than a decade ago, but redevelopment of the site has taken years to materialize. Airbnb’s investment is intended to help close the financing gap on the affordable housing component and move those 201 units forward.

Yes, There Is an Airbnb Elephant in The Room
Of course, there is some irony in Airbnb becoming an investor in affordable housing. Short-term rentals have been part of the housing affordability debate in Austin, and cities around the world for years. Critics argue that homes being used as short-term rentals remove units from the long-term housing supply. Airbnb has pushed back on the idea that STRs are a primary driver of housing affordability and points to cities where restrictive STR policies have not resulted in meaningful declines in housing costs.

As someone who has worked in both residential real estate and the vacation rental industry for more than a decade, I think the conversation is more nuanced than either side sometimes makes it sound.

Short-term rentals absolutely affect individual neighborhoods and properties. But Austin’s broader affordability problem is much bigger than Airbnb. We need more housing, we need different types of housing, and—maybe most importantly—we need to figure out how to actually get housing built when projects become financially difficult.
That’s why I found this announcement particularly interesting.

Airbnb isn't proposing that these affordable units become Airbnbs. In fact, residents of the affordable housing funded through this investment will specifically not be allowed to use their units as short-term rentals.

This is simply an investment in creating additional long-term housing supply.

The Bigger Idea May Be More Important Than the $250 Million
$250 million sounds like a massive number, but compared with the scale of America's housing shortage, it isn't going to solve the problem by itself.  What could be more meaningful is the structure.

Airbnb intends for its investments to represent roughly the final 10% of capital needed for many projects. If relatively small investments can close financing gaps and unlock the other 90% of a project's capital stack, the money can potentially have a much larger impact than the headline investment amount suggests.

The company also says the Housing Accelerator will go beyond financing. Plans include supporting reforms involving zoning, permitting and building codes; creating an open-source dataset tracking housing policies; and launching a $5 million competition for companies and nonprofits developing technology that could make housing easier or less expensive to build.

That last part especially caught my attention.  We talk constantly about housing affordability as though there are only two levers available: prices and interest rates. But the cost and difficulty of actually producing housing matter enormously too.

If we want Austin to remain a city where people at different income levels can actually live—not just a city where existing homeowners watch their property values increase—we have to keep looking at the entire system.

What This Means for Austin
Austin has been through a remarkable housing cycle over the past several years.
We experienced enormous demand and rapid appreciation during the pandemic, followed by one of the most significant housing market corrections in the country. Rents have softened. Home prices have adjusted. Inventory has increased.
But a softer housing market doesn't mean Austin has solved its long-term affordability problem.

The real question is what Austin looks like five, ten or twenty years from now as the region continues to grow.

To me, the most encouraging part of today's announcement wasn't simply that Airbnb is investing $6.4 million in one Austin development. It's that we're seeing another experiment in how public entities, private companies, developers and nonprofits can work together to get housing projects across the finish line.

Some of those experiments will work better than others. But, Austin needs them. As both an Austin native and someone who spends every day working in this housing market, I'm very interested to see what happens next.

If you’ve been waiting for someone to tell you whether the Austin housing market is “good” or “bad,” I have some frustrating news: that question is becoming increasingly useless.

The Austin market is getting healthier overall, but it is not recovering evenly. What’s happening in 78704 looks different from 78703. Westlake looks different from Circle C. And even within the same ZIP code, the market for a well-priced $700,000 house can behave completely differently from the market for a $2 million house.

That’s why I found Unlock MLS’s new Central Texas ZIP Code Scorecard particularly interesting. Rather than looking only at median sales price, the Scorecard attempts to measure how well individual ZIP codes are actually functioning based on buyer behavior. It weighs days on market within the price range where most buyers are purchasing, year-over-year sales activity, changes in median price and how heavily a ZIP code is weighted toward higher-priced inventory.

There are definitely limitations to the data, which I’ll get into, but I think the bigger takeaway is an important one: there really isn’t one Austin housing market anymore.

I’ve been saying for a while that activity is returning, but recovery is not the same thing as returning to the craziness of 2021. July gave us more evidence of that.

Across the Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos metro, 2,739 homes sold in July, up 4.4% from last year. Pending sales increased 4.1%, active listings fell almost 10%, and months of inventory dropped from 5.8 months a year ago to 4.7 months. The median sales price actually increased slightly year over year to $435,000.

Inside the City of Austin, the improvement was even more noticeable. Closed sales jumped 11%, active listings declined 18.2%, and months of inventory fell by 1.8 months to 4.5. The median price was $577,000, down just 1.4% year over year.
This isn’t just one good month, either. During the first half of 2026, the metro recorded 15,698 sales, up 4.8% from the first half of 2025, while pending sales increased 9.8%. At the same time, the year-to-date median price was down 2.4% to $425,000.

​Those aren't boom-market numbers, but they're also not the numbers of a market that is continuing to deteriorate. Buyers are returning, inventory is being absorbed, and transactions are happening again. Prices, meanwhile, are largely stabilizing rather than taking off.
​
That distinction matters. I don’t think Austin needs another massive appreciation cycle to call this a healthier market. Frankly, after what happened between 2020 and 2022, a period of relatively flat prices combined with increasing transaction volume would probably be a pretty healthy outcome.

Unlock MLS classifies individual ZIP codes as Healthy, Transitional, Soft or At-Risk. Days on market in the dominant price band accounts for 35% of the score, year-over-year sales activity accounts for 30%, median-price movement accounts for 20%, and exposure to higher-priced inventory accounts for the remaining 15%.

I actually like this approach because it asks a more useful question than simply, “Did prices go up?” It looks at whether buyers are actually buying, how quickly homes are selling in the price range where most transactions are occurring, whether sales volume is increasing or decreasing, and how much exposure a market has to expensive inventory that generally takes longer to sell.

But I would still call this a snapshot, not a diagnosis. Unlock MLS says essentially the same thing in its methodology: the Scorecard is intended to support conversations rather than replace local expertise, and conditions can vary substantially by street, property type and price point.
​
That caveat becomes especially important when we get into Austin’s higher-end neighborhoods.

I live and work in 78704, so naturally this was one of the first ZIP codes I looked at. Despite its higher price point, 78704 received a Healthy score of 77.

There were 51 MLS sales in July, up 34.2% from July 2025. The median sales price was $742,500, essentially flat year over year at -0.3%. The dominant price band was actually $1 million and above, and the 19 sales within that band averaged 42 days on market.

That feels pretty consistent with what I’m seeing on the ground. Buyers aren't necessarily willing to pay whatever a seller asks. They are picky, condition matters, presentation matters, and aspirational pricing can still result in a house sitting. But buyers are absolutely there.
​
For sellers, that distinction matters. A market where buyers have disappeared is very different from a market where buyers are present but discriminating. Right now, 78704 looks much more like the latter.

78702 also received a Healthy score of 76. MLS sales increased 52.4% year over year, while the median price increased 6.2% to $775,000. Like 78704, its dominant price band was $1 million and above, where the Scorecard showed an average of just 36 days on market.

Nearby 78723 tells a more complicated story. Sales increased 55.6%, but the median price declined 14.3% to $540,000, resulting in a Transitional score of 62. Meanwhile, tiny 78722 received one of the highest scores in the entire report at 91, but only seven transactions occurred there during July.

That last number is a good reminder of why I don't love headlines that simply say "Austin prices are up" or "Austin prices are down." With only seven transactions, a couple of very different properties closing can dramatically change the statistics. The smaller and more diverse the sample gets, the more careful we need to be about the conclusions we draw from it.

The Scorecard also shows some notable strength in Southwest Austin, particularly in 78739 and 78749.

78739 received a Healthy score of 80. Sales increased 34.6% year over year, the median price increased slightly to $825,000, and homes in its dominant $900,000–$999,999 price band averaged only 16 days on market.

78749 scored even higher at 91. Sales increased 59.3% year over year and the median price increased 17% to $600,000. Neighboring 78745, however, landed in the Transitional category with a score of 60. Sales increased 7.7%, but the July median declined 16.9% to $448,750.
​
Again, these ZIP codes are geographically close to one another, but they aren't behaving identically. Buyer preferences, school districts, price point, housing stock, condition and neighborhood all matter.

Two of the numbers that immediately jumped out at me were 78703 and 78746. According to the July Scorecard, 78703's median sales price was down 27.3% year over year and the ZIP received an At-Risk score of just 14. In 78746, the reported median was down 24.7%, earning Westlake a Soft score of 56.

I would take both of those numbers with a pretty large grain of salt.

These are two of Austin's most expensive ZIP codes, with a substantial number of multimillion-dollar properties and an unusually wide range of housing stock. A smaller condo, a teardown on a valuable lot, a $2 million house and a $7 million estate can all exist within the same ZIP code. When you're dealing with relatively low transaction volume at those price points, changes in the mix of homes that happen to close during a particular month can create enormous swings in the median without telling us that the underlying value of comparable homes actually dropped by 25%.

Just look at the sample sizes. The Scorecard recorded only 18 MLS sales in 78703 during July and 27 in 78746. Of those, 88.9% were over $500,000 in both ZIP codes.

There is also another wrinkle that's particularly relevant at the high end of Austin's market: off-market sales. A meaningful portion of luxury real estate trades privately or through agent networks rather than being broadly exposed through the MLS. Unlock MLS's own market statistics are explicitly MLS-only data.

That makes me very hesitant to look at one month of MLS data and declare that Westlake or 78703 has suddenly lost a quarter of its value. The Scorecard is accurately describing the transactions contained in its dataset; I'm just not convinced those transactions give us a complete enough picture of the luxury market to make that broader conclusion.

That doesn't mean Austin's luxury market hasn't softened. It has. Buyers at the $2 million-plus level have more choices, they're negotiating, and properties that miss the mark on price or condition can sit for a long time. But "luxury buyers have leverage" is very different from "Westlake home values fell 25%."

I'd make the same distinction with 78703. Tarrytown, Pemberton Heights, Clarksville and the other neighborhoods within the ZIP contain some extremely expensive and highly unique properties. In a market like that, I care much more about the actual comparable sales for a particular house than I do about the ZIP-code median for a single month.
​
Really, this reinforces one of the biggest lessons in the entire report: the more expensive and unique the property, the less useful broad market statistics become. At some point, “How is 78746 doing?” isn't even the right question. The better question is, “What is the market doing for this type of house, in this part of Westlake, at this price point?”

The ZIP Code Scorecard tells us what's happening within the housing market, but housing doesn't exist in a vacuum. One of the things I found most interesting in the broader Central Texas economic presentation was that Austin's underlying economy continues to grow even after several difficult years for housing.

The presentation showed the Austin MSA adding approximately 23,800 jobs year over year, representing 1.7% job growth, with unemployment around 4%. Austin ranked second among the 50 metros shown for job performance. Austin-Bergstrom also handled approximately 12.9 million passengers during the period cited, up 4.6%.

Those aren't housing statistics, but they matter. Long-term housing demand ultimately needs households, incomes, jobs and economic activity underneath it. Austin went through an enormous housing correction while its underlying economy continued expanding.
​
That's one of the reasons I've never subscribed to the idea that Austin's housing story ended when the pandemic boom did. We had gotten too expensive too quickly. The market needed to correct. That's very different from saying Austin stopped growing.

There was another part of the presentation that I think deserves more attention. On the for-sale side, builders are still building. The presentation cited roughly 9,600 single-family permits year-to-date through July, only slightly below the 9,839 recorded during the same period last year.

But the apartment side looks very different. According to the presentation, Austin's apartment construction pipeline is down roughly 73% from its 2023 peak, with deliveries expected to thin substantially through 2027.

That matters because the flood of apartment deliveries we've experienced over the last several years increased rental supply and gave would-be homebuyers another reason to wait. We're already seeing some evidence that rental inventory is tightening: Unlock MLS reported that active lease listings across the metro were down 26.2% year over year in July, although the median rent was still essentially flat at $2,195.

If apartment deliveries continue to fall and rents eventually begin rising again, the rent-versus-buy calculation starts changing. Home prices don't have to suddenly skyrocket for waiting to become more expensive. If prices remain relatively flat while rents increase — particularly if mortgage rates eventually improve — some of the buyers sitting on the sidelines may start reconsidering ownership.
​
That doesn't mean I'm predicting a huge run-up in prices in 2027. There are still plenty of affordability constraints in this market. But it is a supply-and-demand dynamic worth watching.

I still think this is one of the better buying environments Austin has offered in years, and not because I expect houses to suddenly appreciate 20%.

It's because buyers currently have something they had almost none of during the pandemic market: leverage. You can negotiate price. You can ask for closing costs. You can negotiate repairs. You can be picky about condition. And in many cases, you have enough inventory to walk away if the numbers don't make sense.

At the same time, I generally tell buyers that Austin real estate should be viewed as a longer-term decision. If you think you're going to need to sell in two years, I would be cautious. If you're buying a property that works for you and you're comfortable holding it for five to ten years, I'm much more interested in the opportunity we're seeing today.
​
But even that opportunity isn't going to look identical everywhere. A buyer considering a multimillion-dollar property in 78703 has a very different negotiating position and a very different set of comps from someone competing for a well-priced house in 78739. The ZIP code matters, but the neighborhood, price point, condition and individual property matter even more.

The market is improving, but improving does not mean forgiving. The biggest mistake I continue to see sellers make is pricing based on what their house might have sold for two or three years ago.

Today's buyer has options. If your house is overpriced by 10%, the market usually knows pretty quickly. Sitting for weeks and then chasing the market down through multiple price reductions generally isn't a better strategy than getting the price right in the first place.

The encouraging part is that buyers are buying. City of Austin sales were up 11% in July, metro sales were up 4.4%, pending contracts increased and active inventory declined.
​
You don't need a frenzy to sell a house. You need to understand the buyer for your house, in your neighborhood, at your price point — and position the property accordingly.

My read on Austin hasn't changed much: activity is returning, but recovery does not mean we're going back to 2021. And, I don't think we should want to.

The next version of Austin's housing market is likely to be much more segmented. Some neighborhoods can appreciate while others remain flat. Some price bands can move quickly while homes $500,000 higher sit for months. Luxury markets can require substantial price discovery even while more attainable neighborhoods become increasingly competitive.

The July ZIP Code Scorecard is useful because it makes those differences visible. But it's still one month of MLS data, and I wouldn't make a buying or selling decision based solely on whether your ZIP code happens to be green, yellow, orange or red. Unlock MLS specifically says the Scorecard is intended as a snapshot and that conditions can vary by street, property type and price point.
For me, the biggest takeaway isn't that 78749 scored a 91 or 78703 scored a 14. It's that Austin isn't one housing market anymore, and understanding the micro-market you're actually buying or selling in is becoming far more valuable than knowing what the Austin median price did last month.