Austin Small Houses – Part 1

Interested in Small Houses in Austin?

This is the summer where small houses, and  itty bitty houses – ranging from microhouses, to tiny houses to just merely small houses are all the rage on the Internets.

The tiny house movement has been picking up steam for years. Just recently two tiny house builders’ tiny houses have been shared so many times, it is almost impossible not to run across the articles:

• MiniMotives – a woman loses her regular home to foreclosure, then builds a tiny home from salvaged parts
• hOMe – a couple with two children lives in a 207 sf (plus 110 sf loft) tiny house

Fascinated yet?

Well, we sure are.

We’d love to live in a tiny house one day, but for now we’re just going to write about them, starting with merely small houses in Austin and working our way towards tiny.

Where are the Small Houses in Austin?

To answer that question, we turned to the local MLS to look at sales data.  In the past 12 months (so, between 8/14/2013 and 8/13/2014), 112 houses smaller than 800 square feet have sold.  Here is a map of where they were located:

•  The median price for these small houses was $201,500 (range: $59,000 to $540,000).
• The median size was 720 square feet.
• The smallest house was a mere 336 sf and sold for $59,000.
• The most expensive house was 779 square feet (and sold for $540,000) in Bouldin (a very hip, urban area of Austin).
• The median age of these 112 small Austin houses was 64 years old.
• You can see from the map that most are clustered east of I-35, east of downtown.

Photographing Small Houses in Austin

Well, clearly it was time to drag out the camera and go take some photos. But where to start?  How about in this neighborhood, south of E 7th Street:

• The median price of these 18 homes was $281,325 (range: $160,000 to $340,000).
• The median size was 720 square feet.
• The median age was 75 years old.
• Most sold in average-to-poor condition and half sold for cash.

I wish I could share which house sold for what, but I can’t – that data is confidential.

I set out to photograph those 18 houses, and soon ran into a snag – the streets in this area are narrow and tend to have cars parked on both sides. Several streets had road construction crews tearing up the asphalt and quite a few houses were undergoing serious rehabilitation, which means dumpsters and lots of work trucks parked out front.

So, I gave up shooting the 18 small houses in this area that sold this year and instead took photos of a whole bunch of little ones – ones that looked to be 800 sf and under, to share here.