October 1, 2026
Half of central Austin has been sitting for three months
Fifty percent of the active listings in the five central ZIP codes have been on the market ninety days or longer, one in five has been there past a hundred and eighty, and there is exactly one ZIP where that is not the story.
Nobody herehas to hurry.
Across the 959 active listings in 78701 through 78705 that carry a days-on-market count, the median is 87 days. Not the average, the median: half of everything for sale in central Austin has been for sale for three months or more.
| On the market | Listings | Share |
|---|---|---|
| 30 days or longer | 779 | 81% |
| 90 days or longer | 474 | 49% |
| 180 days or longer | 192 | 20% |
| 365 days or longer | 40 | 4% |
A listing that has been sitting since spring is a different conversation from one that went up last week, and roughly a fifth of central Austin is in that position. The seller has carried six months of taxes, insurance and probably a mortgage on a house nobody has offered on. That is not leverage you have to manufacture. It is already there, and it is knowable before you write.
Except in one ZIP, and that is the useful part
| ZIP | Active | Median days | Past 180 days |
|---|---|---|---|
| 78701 | 215 | 121 | 27% |
| 78702 | 203 | 79 | 19% |
| 78703 | 113 | 58 | 12% |
| 78704 | 304 | 68 | 17% |
| 78705 | 124 | 123 | 24% |
78703 is the outlier, at a median of 58 days. It is the ZIP that holds Tarrytown, Clarksville, Old Enfield and Pemberton Heights, and it is also the one with the least inventory of the five. Houses there are selling in about half the time of the downtown towers. If you are shopping in 78703, the patience the rest of this post describes is not available to you, and the sellers know it.
The split by type runs the same way: a median of 99 days for condominiums against 66 for houses. Which is roughly what the inventory mix predicts, since central Austin is majority condominium and the condominiums are concentrated downtown. What the dues actually buy is a separate question, and a longer one.
What this number is not
Days on market is the MLS field, and the MLS clock restarts when a listing is withdrawn and relisted. Plenty of sellers do exactly that to shed a stale number. So every figure above is a floor rather than a ceiling: the true time some of these houses have been available is longer than the feed says, never shorter.
It is also asking prices and listing dates, not sold data. The metro picture, where the median sale price was $412,000 in August 2026, down 6.4% year over year, comes from the association rather than from here, and it is on the market page with its source and release date.
Computed from the MLS feed as of October 17, 2026 at 9:09 AM CDT. The figures in this post’s record are frozen at publication; the tables above are live.
Listings courtesy of Unlock MLS as distributed by MLS GRID
Based on information submitted to the MLS GRID as of October 17, 2026 at 9:09 AM CDT. All data obtained from various sources and may not have been verified by broker or MLS GRID.
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