The Austin metro housing market is on pace for another record-setting year.

There were 2,292 single-family home sales in October, according to new Austin Board of Realtors data released Tuesday. The region is on pace to record more than 30,600 sales in 2017, compared with 29,569 last year.

And a recent report by Realtor.com found the median home price in Austin increased 63 percent from 2006 to 2016, the fastest rate in the nation for large metros.

The October figure was up 2.2 percent from the same month a year prior. Much of the growth was concentrated in the suburbs: Single-family home sales increased 1.4 percent year-over-year in October in Travis County, which is home to the majority of Austin proper, while Williamson County to the north saw 5.4 percent growth and Hays County to the south saw 6.2 percent growth.

Click to read more at Austin Business Journal. 

Once a small commercial real estate market with an equally small cadre of brokers, Austin is now a magnet for young professionals learning the biz. There are still a few long-serving experts who understand how Austin became Austin, and how it can continue its successful upward trajectory.

Mike Kennedy of Avison Young, as such, may be the dean of brokerage in Austin, having moved here in 1985 from Houston where he learned the business in tandem with being an attorney.

“I went to law school because I always had an interest in being a professional, and I felt like being a lawyer would put me in that category. It provided a good business education as well, and it’s proven to be very helpful over the years,” Kennedy said.

Click to read more at Austin Business Journal.

Austin’s red-hot commercial real estate market means office tenants are paying rental rates similar to those found in some of the country’s priciest cities.

That’s according to new research on the cost of office space from CommercialCafe, a real estate research firm.

A tenant spending $5,000 per month for Class A office space can get 1,087 square feet in Austin.

That trails only Boston (where you could afford 1,006 square feet); Washington, D.C. (849 square feet); San Francisco (803 square feet); and New York City (703 square feet).

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Our annual list of the largest multi-tenant office buildings in Austin is out, and downtown skyscrapers continue to tower over the competition.

You can see photos and key statistics for the top 10 via the slideshow on this page. ABJ subscribers can dive into more data about the top 25 office buildings in the area here. We also have a new list of the 25 largest multi-tenant office parks in Central Texas.

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Seattle has edged out Austin as the best city for commercial real estate investment in the “Emerging Trends in Real Estate 2018” study, conducted by accounting and consulting giant PwC. The annual ranking is distributed by the Urban Land Institute at its fall meeting — being held Oct. 23-26 in Los Angeles.

Last year, Austin ranked No. 1, but the slippage probably has nothing to do with economic performance. Seattle merely received a few more top scores from the people surveyed — a spectrum of people with an interest and expertise in real estate.

Mitch Roschelle, author of the report and a partner with PwC, said Austin leads the way when it comes to delivering a strong, young, skilled workforce — who are ready, willing and able to embrace the work of the future.

“Austin’s secret sauce is that the workers are there,” Roschelle told me.

Click to read more at Austin Business Journal.