A whopping 79% of home buyers in this pandemic-era Texas boomtown are now selling at a loss

Homeowners across Austin are learning a brutal lesson about buying at the top of the market. Ryan McPherson bid $20,000 over asking for a four-bedroom home in East Austin back in 2022, paying $615,000 for a house he’s now bracing to sell for as little as $420,000, a roughly 30% loss. “Everybody that I worked with, they kept saying Austin only goes up,” McPherson told Business Insider in an interview. He’s since moved back to Phoenix and is done waiting for a turnaround. “I’m not going to keep trying to wait this out and pray that there’s a turnaround, because it’s not coming right now,” he said. “I’d rather just stop losing sleep over it.” Four years after Austin’s pandemic-era homebuying frenzy peaked, the city is grappling with a painful real estate hangover. madison500 – stock.adobe.com