How to create your dream home in Austin's hot real estate market

How to create your dream home in Austin's hot real estate market


Editor's note: With rents hitting historic highs, and in many metros surpassing them, the share of Americans who wish to achieve homeownership is rising year-over-year. Our friends at Trulia share insight on the dream of owning a home — and how to achieve it in Austin.

The number of Americans who dream of owning a home one day is up to 75 percent, according to a survey conducted by Harris Poll and Trulia. Within the millennial category, 80 percent of young people imagine owning their own home at some point. These statistics show that the American dream, which steadily declined after the housing market crash and recession of late 2008, is alive and well across all age groups. 

In a recent study, Trulia ranked Austin the third best market to watch in 2016 based on five metrics: high job growth over the past year, affordability rates, large number of inbound home searches, high percentage of millennials, and low vacancy rates. Austin stole the third spot, behind the Grand Rapids, Michigan and Charleston, South Carolina, primarily due to a high share of millennial residents and the healthy job market.

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When a Whole Foods or Trader Joe's moves in, there goes the neighborhood

When a Whole Foods or Trader Joe's moves in, there goes the neighborhood


There are four grocery stores within five blocks of my apartment. This once seemed like a selling point. It’s the opposite of a food desert — a food oasis, if you will, with national and regional grocery chains, a co-op, and a Trader Joe’s nearly in spitting distance of my front door. But it’s also one of the most expensive zip codes in Seattle — so expensive that the rent on my 300-square-foot shitbox of a studio is more than the mortgage on a sprawling suburban McMansion in most states. I’ve always assumed there was a correlation between the abundance of grocery stores — all of which have pleasant lighting, organic produce, and local kombucha in the cooler — in my neighborhood and the high cost of rent. Now there’s research to back me up.
A new study finds that grocery stores don’t just show up in expensive neighborhoods — they actually create them, especially when that grocery store is a Trader Joe’s or a Whole Foods. CityLab reports:


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8 Smart Ways to Boost Your Home Value

When Alec and Jennifer Harmes spent $264,900 for their first home in 2011—a 1,500-square-foot ranch fixer-­upper in Austin, Texas—they assumed they would be living there for many years. So the couple, millennials in their early 30s, embarked on a series of ... http://time.com/money/4185900/boost-home-value/

The healthiest housing markets in the U.S.

These are the three healthiest housing markets in the U.S.




Metro areas as diverse as Fresno, Calif., Austin, Texas, and Honolulu, Hawaii are the healthiest housing markets in the country, according to mortgage giant Freddie Mac.
That’s how its Multi-Indicator Market Index, or “MiMi,” which pulls together data that aims to show whether local, state and national housing markets are stable and “consistent with that market’s long-term normal activity,” assessed conditions in October.  http://flip.it/FKJjW