Austin home sales reach $1.2 billion while median home price goes up

The Austin Board of Realtors' new May 2017 market report shows the month is the highest-grossing month for Central Texas real estate in history: $1.2 billion in home sales.

They say it's partially due to rising home prices in the Austin-Round Rock area.

"I think what the builders are doing is they're building more on the higher end because it's getting so expensive to build in the city.  The lot costs are so expensive, the labor costs are going up you know all of that stuff is factoring into the home costs," said Aaron Farmer with the Austin Board of Realtors.

3,170 single family homes were sold in May and that's 9% more than May of last year.

But the median home price is $310,000.

Aaron Farmer with the Board of Realtors says there aren't a lot of affordable homes to choose from in the Austin area.

"If you dive deeper into the stats you'll see that homes under $250,000, there's hardly any in Austin," Farmer said.

Basically -- we need more homes.

"We need to make it easier for home builders and developers to come in and add product, add homes people want to be in, in areas of town they want to be in.  So fixing the land development code is our number one priority right now," Farmer said.

Farmer says they've been working with the Austin City Council to make sure that's done right

"We need something for our musicians who don't make a lot of money, you know for our restaurant servers, we need all those people I mean we can't...everybody can't live in Kyle and bus in everyday, it's not realistic and it changes the fabric of what Austin is," Farmer said.