Austin: a market reset might just be what it needed

In the middle of July, Lake Travis reached full pool for the first time in seven years. The mark is 681 feet above sea level, and the lake had not touched it since July 2019. For most of the years between, it sat far enough below that boat ramps ended in mud and a limestone hump the locals call Sometimes Island stood well clear of the water. In September 2023 the lake recorded the fourth lowest level in its history. Three years later Sometimes Island is underwater again and the shoreline sits roughly where people who grew up here remember it.

That is a useful way to read the county. Most of what gets written about Austin right now is about what left. The domestic migration, the bidding wars, the office tenants, the 2022 prices. All of that is true. But the part that has stayed is more interesting than the part that went, and it is the part a buyer has to understand.

Who is leaving and who is not

Between July 2022 and July 2023, roughly 2,500 more people moved out of Travis County than moved in. That was the first year of net domestic outflow since 2002. The next year it happened again. The City of Austin's own demographers wrote to the city council in 2025 that domestic migration to the region was at an all time low, and that without international arrivals the county would have lost population outright.

Most of those departures did not go far. Williamson County to the north picked up about 20,000 net movers in the same period, and Hays County to the south grew with it. Bank of America's analysis of card data found the outflow going to Kyle, Buda, New Braunfels, and San Antonio, which is people trading a Travis County address for a cheaper one within commuting distance. The metro as a whole still grew. It was the fourth fastest growing large metro in the country in 2024, down from second, and it now holds about 2.55 million people.

So the county lost its story, not its region. That distinction runs through everything else in this piece.

Real estate

The Austin metro median sale price in July 2026 was $435,000, up 1.0 percent from a year earlier and roughly a fifth below where it peaked in the spring of 2022. Inside the city limits the median was $577,000. Zillow's home value index for the city sits at about $504,000, down 4.4 percent over the past year. Homes are taking about 63 days to sell across the metro and the market carries 4.7 months of inventory, which is balanced by any conventional definition.

Travis County holds 6,586 of the metro's 13,796 active listings, the most of any county in the region, and it added 1,972 new ones in July alone. That is a lot of supply for a county that is not gaining domestic movers.

New construction is where the pressure shows. In the $500,000 to $600,000 tier around Austin, builders are carrying roughly eight months of supply against a normal four to six, and Dripping Springs and Bee Cave in the western part of the county are still absorbing product that was started when the migration numbers looked different. That is the tier where the builder discounts run deepest, and it is the tier that produced the national headline this summer about new homes pricing below resale for the first time on record.

Office is the other half. Austin's office vacancy was 22.4 percent in the first quarter of 2026 according to Colliers, flat from a year earlier and well above the national figure of 18.6 percent. Downtown ran above 22 percent in late 2025, a record, and the Downtown Austin Alliance put it at just over 20 percent in May. When Sixth and Guadalupe opened at 400 West Sixth it was 91 percent empty.

What makes that number worth a second look is what is underneath it. Office using employment in Austin grew about 34 percent between 2019 and 2025, the most of any American city. Net absorption over the trailing year was about 2.6 million square feet against about 180,000 the year before. The vacancy is a construction hangover, not a demand collapse. Four towers came online in eighteen months into a market that had stopped growing at the pace that justified them, and the space is slowly filling behind a job base that never stopped.

Downtown itself is not struggling in the way the vacancy rate implies. The Alliance counts more than 160,000 visitors on an average day, about 14,000 residents, 131,000 employees, and $2.5 billion in consumer spending last year, with foot traffic at 93 percent of where it was before the pandemic. Three large public projects are underway at once: the reconstruction of Interstate 35 through the center of the city, light rail, and the convention center rebuild. New private construction downtown has stopped, and it will stay stopped until those three are far enough along that a developer can see past them.

The listed companies

Travis County has an unusual public company base for a county its size. It is barbelled. At the top sit Tesla and Oracle, and beneath them a bench of mid caps that would anchor most metros on their own.

Tesla's principal executive offices are at 1 Tesla Road, on the Gigafactory site in the eastern part of the county near Del Valle. The company moved its headquarters here in late 2021 and reincorporated in Texas in 2024. It carries a market value around a trillion dollars and unveiled its purpose built robotaxi at ACL Live on Wednesday, in the city where the robotaxi service has been running since the summer of 2025.

Oracle moved its corporate headquarters to Austin at the end of 2020 and owns about 900,000 square feet on the south shore of Lady Bird Lake. It has since signaled an intent to move its world headquarters to Nashville. That intent has never appeared in a securities filing, and the company's most recent annual report still lists Austin as its headquarters facility. CrowdStrike files from an Austin address as well.

Below them, all headquartered inside the county: YETI, with $1.83 billion in revenue in 2024 and a place in the S&P 400. Cirrus Logic, the audio chip designer, headquartered here since 2000 with $1.79 billion in revenue. Natera, the genetic testing company. Bumble, with $965 million in 2025 revenue, a net loss of $895 million, and about 580 employees. Silicon Labs, Q2 Holdings, SailPoint, Vital Farms, and Summit Hotel Properties round out the bench.

Two things are missing from that list and worth naming. Dell is not a Travis County company. It sits in Round Rock, in Williamson County, and so does Samsung's Taylor fab. And the largest employers in Austin's semiconductor and hardware economy, Apple, AMD, NXP, Samsung, Applied Materials, and IBM, all run major campuses here without being headquartered here. The county's payroll depends on companies that answer to boards somewhere else.

Lake Travis

The lake is a reservoir, not a natural body of water, and the Lower Colorado River Authority operates it for flood control and water supply first and recreation a distant third. It and Lake Buchanan upstream are the primary water source for more than a million people. Full pool is 681 feet.

It got full the hard way. The July 2025 rains that put the lake within reach were the same system that flooded the Guadalupe two counties west, and the July 2026 rains that pushed it over the mark were the same system that flooded the Guadalupe again. The combined storage of Travis and Buchanan went from 51 percent to more than 90 percent in the space of a few days last year. As of this week Travis is at 95 percent, coming off the summer.

For the real estate around it, a full lake changes what a property is. Coves that were dry are water again. Docks that ended in air reach the surface. The Oasis and the marinas and the lakefront lots on the north shore have their views back after seven years. The LCRA's own projections say the lake holds close to full under median rainfall through the winter and declines under dry conditions, which is to say the next two years depend on weather, and the last seven years should be the reference for what dry looks like.

The comedy scene

Joe Rogan moved to Austin from Los Angeles in 2020 and opened the Comedy Mothership in March 2023 in the old Ritz Theater on East Sixth Street. It has two rooms, a bar named for Mitzi Shore of the Comedy Store, and a door policy stricter than the airport. Kill Tony, the live podcast that moved from Los Angeles the same year Rogan did, records there every Monday at eight after several years at Vulcan Gas Company down the street. Comics put their names in a bucket for a chance at one minute on stage.

That is the center of it, but it is no longer the whole of it. Shane Gillis is based here. The Creek and the Cave relocated from New York. Cap City, Vulcan, and Sunset Strip on Red River book touring headliners most nights of the week, and Matt Rife and others have filmed specials in rooms on Sixth Street. Rising comics move here now the way they once moved to Los Angeles, on the theory that a slot at the Mothership is the fastest route to an audience. KUT reported in August on counter programming at ColdTowne Theater built explicitly against the Rogan orbit's reputation, which is what a scene looks like when it is large enough to have factions.

What matters about this for a county reader is not the comedy. It is that Austin built a national cultural draw from nothing in five years, in an old theater on a street the city had written off, and the draw is unrelated to the tech economy that the migration numbers track. When the tech story cooled, Sixth Street did not.

What would change the picture

Austin is the opposite problem from Fredericksburg. There, the demand was priced in and the entry points were closed. Here, the price has reset and the entry points are open. That does not make it a buy. It makes it a place where the question is about the floor rather than the ceiling.

Before committing capital we would want:

• Domestic migration into Travis County turning positive again, or at minimum the outflow to Williamson and Hays slowing. That is the number that moved first on the way down and it is the one to watch on the way back.
• Office vacancy below 20 percent citywide with absorption holding near the trailing year's pace. The job growth is real. The space has to catch up to it.
• The $500,000 to $600,000 new construction tier back under six months of supply, which would mean the builders have worked through what they started in 2022.
• On the lake, a dry winter that does not take Travis below 90 percent. If it holds, the lakefront has a different risk profile than it did in 2023.

The county is not in decline. It is in the part of the cycle where the froth has left and the base is visible, and the base is a trillion dollar company, a quarter million office workers, a full lake, and a street that reinvented itself. We will keep reading this one, and unlike Fredericksburg, we would not be surprised to find something here.