Leading Indicators: Pendings Up, Builder Traffic Up, Ratio Still Beating Last Year
Pending listings sit at 5,195, up 4.6% year over year. That is a meaningful beat against the same Monday in May 2025. The new listing-to-pending ratio is 0.58, which is lower than April but still ahead of where this ratio sat a year ago. May historically has a lower ratio than April because of the seasonal surge in new listings, so the right comparison is May to May, not May to April. On that comparison we are winning.
The most important external read this morning came from the National Association of Home Builders Housing Market Index, which published at 9 a.m. central. The number that matters on that report is Table 3, the traffic of prospective buyers, because traffic is the leading indicator inside the leading indicator. It moved from 22 to 25, matching the March print and running roughly 10 to 12% higher than this point in 2025. Inside Austin, the read is even stronger than the national number. Builder ground inventory and the three-month pipeline are sitting at a two to three year low because builders pulled back on development. The result is that buyer leverage with builders has compressed compared to a year ago, and compressed even more compared to two years ago. Incentives still exist, especially in southeast Austin and the hyper-supply zip codes, but the days of an automatic 6% discount or fifty-thousand-dollar price reductions are not the rule in most submarkets anymore.
Lagging Indicators: May Closings Are Telling a Real Story
May closings are projecting to 3,150 sold properties, up 0.9% year over year. The average sold price for May is $608,563, up 4.4% YoY. The median sold price is $464,445, up 4.8% YoY. Sold-to-list ratio is 97.93%, the highest it has been since the spring of 2024.
The driver behind the price gain is the top quartile of the market. Properties sold in the top 25th percentile by price went from $625,000 a year ago to $669,500 this year, a 7.1% gain year over year. The bottom 25th percentile is still slightly negative at -1.8%. The luxury tier is what is pulling the average and median up. That is a real shift in buyer composition and worth understanding before applying it to any specific client. Year to date, 12,784 properties have closed, up 4.1% versus the same period last year, and 16.4% above the long-term average for the January-to-May window. On a per-realtor basis, closings are up 10.2% versus last year, which is the apples-to-apples productivity read for anyone in the business.
Zip-Code-Level Reality: The Average Hides the Truth
The activity index for the entire MLS is 23.7%, with new construction at 32.50% and resale at 20.58%. Resale sitting at just above 20% is the line we are watching. Anything below 20% on resale is the danger zone where price corrections accelerate. The map underneath the headline number tells the real story. Five zip codes are hot, including 78737 in southwest Austin, 78739 in Circle C, 78729 in northwest Austin, 78750 in Jester, and 78749 in southwest Austin. Thirteen zip codes are warm. Forty-two are balanced. Thirteen are cool. Two zip codes, 78705 and 78957 Smithville, are cold. A buyer in 78750 is in a completely different market than a buyer in 78705, even though both addresses say Austin or near-Austin on the listing sheet.
On the city level, six cities are positive year over year on median sold price and twenty-three are negative. Wimberley hit an all-time peak at $589,700 on the median, up 20.1% YoY, outpacing every other city in the metro. Bastrop, Burnet, Lago Vista, Manor, and Smithville round out the six positive cities. The remaining twenty-three are still working through the correction, with the larger cities like Austin, Round Rock, Pflugerville, and Leander down somewhere between 1.9% and 3.9% YoY on the median.
Rates, the Bond Market, and Why Buyers Are Behaving Differently
The ten-year Treasury is up roughly 1.3 basis points this morning after a brutal Friday and a brutal week. CPI and PPI both came in hotter than expected, with the producer side absolutely crushing the bond market. Mortgage-backed securities have not recovered, and we are sitting over a repricing line as of this morning. Rates published at 6.75% today, but if we do not see a pullback on MBS pricing in the next 24 to 48 hours, the rate sheet is likely heading to 6.875%. Lenders are holding back as long as they can because the 7% threshold has historically been the wall where buyer activity hits a hard stop.
The buyer behavior worth noting: rather than freezing on a rising-rate signal, the buyers who are still in the market are accelerating to get ahead of the next move. That is the opposite of what we saw in late 2022 and 2023. It is a confidence read on housing relative to what buyers expect rates to do next. Wednesday and Thursday are the heavy data days this week, with the FOMC minutes, the twenty-year bond auction, housing starts, permits, and jobless claims all in play.
What This All Adds Up To
The market is in recovery. Inventory is down 1.9% YoY at 16,751 active listings. Months of inventory is 5.86, down 3.9% YoY. Pendings are up. Closings are up. Prices are up at the top and flat at the bottom. The risk to the recovery is on the rate side, not the demand side. As long as we stay under 7%, the recovery thesis holds.
