Ed 
A friend told me 40% of Austin homes sell over list price. He’s not wrong. He’s just three years late. That was 2022, 37.9% to be exact. At the 2021 peak it hit 52%. More than half of every sale went over ask, and the typical winner paid $30,000 above list.
Today? 12%. About 1 in 8. And when a home does go over, it’s by a median of $6,000, not $30,000. The bidding-war market people still tell stories about ended years ago.
But 12% hides where the heat actually is. It’s not the luxury market. Homes over $1M go over ask just 9% of the time. It’s the entry level. Under $300k, it’s 15%. And geographically it’s the affordable outer ring doing the competing. Killeen 24%, Elgin 17%, Kyle and Jarrell around 14%, not the marquee central-Austin ZIP codes people assume are hot.
So the real market isn’t hot or cold. It’s split. A $350k starter home in Kyle can still draw a bidding war while a $1.2M house in town sits and negotiates. If you’re a seller pricing off 2021 stories, you’ll sit. If you’re a buyer who thinks you have to throw $30k over ask to win, you don’t, unless you’re fighting for the exact kind of home everyone else can afford too.
The numbers moved on. Most people are still quoting a market that no longer exists.
How I got these numbers: I pulled every closed sale in our MLS database from January 2020 through July 2026, 214,037 transactions across the Austin metro, including 35,762 in the last twelve months. Sold over list means the final sale price came in above the final list price. I excluded a small number of placeholder records with list prices under $50,000, land parcels and data-entry errors that would distort the math, and used the median rather than the average for premiums so a handful of outliers can’t skew the story. This is our own data, not a national headline, which is exactly why it looks different from what your friend heard.
