City dubbed 'Silicon Hills' sees college grads flock there for 'insane' deals including 2 months FREE rent

Daily Mail​

4 hours ago

A Texas city with a booming tech industry has been dubbed the best place for young adults to move after college for its shockingly affordable rental options.
Austin, the capital of the Lone Star State, is the ideal location to launch into post-graduate life for its astonishing income-to-rent ratio and significant number of available homes, according to Realtor.com.
The digital real estate marketplace crunched numbers from 318 US cities in the 50 largest metropolitan areas, each with populations of more than 75,000 people, to determine the top 10 rental markets for the up-and-coming demographic.
Experts considered affordability for the 25 to 34 age group, number of open rentals, job opportunities in the area and occupation stability.
Silicon Hills - a nickname the city earned for attracting business including Dell, IBM, Amazon, Google, Oracle and Apple - earned its spot at the top of that list.
'Austin has always been such a desirable destination for people to move to,' Brad Pauly, the founder of Pauly Presley Realty, told DailyMail.com.
'Heck, I moved here from Houston 30 years ago and I've never wanted to leave just because it's such a great city.'
Every year, Pauly's firm rents out roughly 500 homes in the Austin Metropolitan area.
Clients are generally in their 20s and 30s and come to the city for work, he said.
'Austin's always kind of been a 'younger town' because the workforce in tech is younger,' he explained.
'Some are looking for those four-bedroom affordable homes that you can get for around 2,200 bucks a month. And then all the way to your downtown high-rise dwellers, who are just looking for a penthouse in the sky.'
He said the Central Texas hub has always been uniquely tailored to a freshly-graduated age group, as there are a variety of outdoor recreational options and a bustling 'party scene'.
'And of course, another thing that a lot of people love about this town is the affordability factor,' he explained.
Austin's median rent price is $1,450 per month, $249 less than the national average of $1,699, Realtor.com reported.
Earning an average annual income of $95,475 - 15.6 percent higher than the average across the top 50 metropolitan areas - residents can afford a median rent of $2,560.
However, the average rent is only $1,470, meaning the city has the lowest rent-to-income ratio on the list.
This ratio reflects the portion of someone's income that must go towards rent each month.
Austin's is only 18.9 percent, meaning less than a quarter of people's incomes are contributing the their living accommodations, giving residents more freedom with their wages.
The average across the top 50 metros is 24.9 percent. Every city that made it to the top 10 places for recent graduates - including Raleigh, North Carolina and Minneapolis, Minnesota - had lower ratios than this average.
But what sets Austin apart is its significantly higher vacancy rate than any other city named by Realtor.com.
Also regarded as the 'Live Music Capital of the World,' 29.4 percent of rentals are available.
'That percentage, I imagine, is going to go up as more and more apartment complexes become available,' Pauly explained, pointing to a housing situation created by the pandemic.
During COVID, the Austin area was essentially grid locked in terms of real estate and had 'almost negative inventory', he said.
People swarmed Austin from across the country as it was an affordable place to live and had less strict protocols than other places in the US.
'All the occupancy rates for apartment complexes in 2021, 2022 were 99 percent,' the realtor added.
'Austin had almost no inventory in terms of leasing or properties to buy, which is one of the reasons the market appreciated so fast here in such a short amount of time.
'And so at the time it was, 'oh, we need housing, right?' So I can't tell you how many developers started building homes, developing complexes, which are still coming along today.'
Developers went into overdrive - and luxurious apartment complexes started popping up throughout the city and nearby areas.
Residents also started selling their homes and dropping their leases as COVID eased up, suddenly creating a wide-open housing market.
More rental options became available in the capital and its surrounding cities, but less people started moving in, Pauly said.
In 2020, roughly 48,800 people from other states moved to the Austin Metropolitan Statistical Area, according to the Austin Chamber of Commerce. But in 2024, under 14,000 people ventured into the city.
In fact, Austin was among the top five US cities that people were fleeing from just last year, according to a PODS survey.
There was improvement this year, as it was in the top 20 cities with the highest move out rates.
Although data shows Austin is a favorable place to rent, it is not an ideal market for prospective home buyers.
'It's mainly due to the higher interest rates. So the Austin sales market is slow right now,' Pauly explained.
'But all that's going to take for that to change is for mortgage rates to come down even a half point.
'You can get some great deals now in Austin. In a lot of ways, it's more cost-effective to rent than buy right now in Austin - especially in apartment complexes.'
The Howard apartments is incentivizing renters with two and a half free months of rent.
Located in Manor, just about 15 minutes away from Austin, a 575-sqaure-foot one-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment is listed at about $1,300 per month.
In comparison, renters should expect to pay anywhere from $3,234 to $6,781 for a similar apartment in Manhattan, according to Apartments.com.
The Lakes apartment complex in Austin is also offering a rent break to lure people in - six weeks of free rent, according to its website.
The Prado in Dell Valle, just about 15 minutes away from Austin, is offering 8 weeks without pay.
'It's these lease-up deals. They try as hard as they can to lease up their properties as quickly as they can without reducing the actual effective lease rate by giving free months of rent,' Pauly summarized.
But he is not sure how long these sweet deals will last.
'That's the million-dollar question. It really is, because there's still people moving to Austin, even though we had a net loss of residents last year,' he explained.