Nash Garrison is ready for prospective home buyers to see his house — a 1937 Travis Heights bungalow he remodeled and listed on the market for $1.45 million in mid-March. That was right around the time the initial impacts of the coronavirus pandemic were starting to emerge in the Austin area.

With much having changed in just one month, Garrison now is well prepared: He’s armed with Purell hand sanitizer, protective booties and rubber gloves. Just give him a little notice, and he’ll have them at his front door.

But no one has come knocking, despite his 2,300-square-foot, three-bedroom home on Alta Vista Avenue having had 3,096 views on Zillow in 28 days.

"The online interest is exciting," Garrison said, "but that has not translated into any live, in-person showings or even a sight-unseen offering. I don’t totally blame them for not waiting to go into a stranger’s house. I get that."

While the pandemic’s full impact on the Austin-area housing market is yet to be determined, local real estate experts say there’s no doubt Central Texas’ 10-year hot streak for housing has come to an abrupt, unanticipated and shell-shocking halt, dashing hopes for early spring’s usual peak home-selling season.

"We are, without question, facing a significant slowdown in home sales as we enter into what is typically the most active season for the housing market," said Charles Heimsath, an Austin real estate consultant. "I won’t be surprised if we have a 30% decline in (home sales) over the next three months. It is just too difficult to show property, obtain appraisals, make repairs and find an interested lender, particularly at the higher end of the market."

New numbers released this week for two of the region’s key housing market metrics — March home sales and first-quarter housing starts — don’t show significant declines. In fact, home starts were up 1.9% across the five-county Austin region, while the median home-sales price rose 11.7% to $337,000. Housing starts even set a record for the first three months of the year.

But industry experts say those reports don’t yet reflect the true impact of the coronavirus crisis.

"It’s important to remember the March closings figures for the resale market primarily reflect homes that went under contract in January and February, so any impacts from the pandemic won’t be evident in the statistics until we see the April and May figures," said Eldon Rude, a longtime Austin-area housing market expert.

Rude said the job losses the region already has sustained, and the jobs likely to be lost in the months to come, "will ultimately mean fewer homebuyers as well as a blow to consumer confidence, which is key to the home-buying decision."

"The key factors that will dictate how our housing market fares through this period are how long it lasts and how damaging it is to our economy," said Rude, principal of 360° Real Estate Analytics, an Austin real estate consulting firm. "While each day we get answers to questions we had yesterday, every day it seems there are a whole new set of facts that add uncertainty to the future."

Builders affected

Homebuilding is among the many area industries being dealt a blow by the virus-created downturn. For some builders, sales are off 40% to 50% since mid-March, according to Metrostudy, which tracks the housing market locally and nationally.

March through May is a critical time for builders, a period when new home sales typically ramp up, said Vaike O’Grady, regional director in Austin for Metrostudy.

"Builders effectively lost the remainder of spring selling season. It’s going to be tough to make that up," she said.

In a web address this week, Ali Wolf, chief economist for Meyers Research, part of Metrostudy, said home starts are projected to be down about 22% nationwide this year compared with 2019.

"We could be too optimistic," Wolf said. "It could be 30% or 35%."

Those projections are in contrast to the start the Austin homebuilding market got off to this year. Central Texas builders started construction on 4,777 houses, a first-quarter record and an increase of 11% from the year-ago quarter. A record also was set for home starts on an annual 12-month running basis: 19,356, up 15% from the 12 months that ended in March 2019.

However, O’Grady said, there is "no question the starts pace has slowed considerably since the onset of stay-at-home rules. Most builders are working by appointment only and/or via virtual meetings with prospective shoppers. New home sales are still happening, but at nowhere near the pace of previous months."

Most builders have not adjusted prices on homes that are yet to be built, but some are offering incentives on quick move-ins, she said.

"They don’t want to carry a lot of unsold inventory on the books as we move past the traditional spring selling season," O’Grady said.

Some builders are holding off on purchases of land and lots, she said. But with a record 6,554 lots delivered in the first quarter, up 72% from the year-ago quarter, "the market will have more supply available if demand rebounds post-COVID-19," O’Grady said.

"One thing that could hold us back is mortgage companies getting more conservative in terms of loan approvals. A good portion of potential buyers don’t have excellent credit or large down payments, so that may put some folks on the sidelines," O’Grady said.

‘Pretty shocking’

While the March home sales data didn’t reflect it, things are, in fact, very tough in the Austin market right now, sad real estate agent Clayton Bullock with Austin’s Moreland Properties.

The decline in the number of closed sales and pending sales for April "will be pretty shocking," said Bullock, who is representing Garrison in the sale of his Travis Heights home.

The Austin Board of Realtors’ figures show pending sales were down 18% in March for the region as a whole. But Bullock said that for a smaller subset of the Austin metro area, and stretching almost to Lakeway, pending sales were down 30% in March compared with March 2019.

"There have been so many deals that have fallen apart, mostly due to the job situation," Bullock said. "People who have lost jobs or been furloughed or had their salaries cut, can no longer get financing. I’m hearing about it all over town, and in all price points."

People who don’t have to sell their homes "are pulling their houses off the market and waiting this out," Bullock said. He said he understands why his client Garrison’s house hasn’t sold — at the $1.45 million list price, prospective buyers "are going to want to touch and see and feel and experience it," Bullock said.

Austin real estate broker Derrick Jones said he is also seeing the wait-and-see mindset, particularly for people who don’t have to buy or sell right now.

"Those with the option of not selling now are pulling their homes off the market," said Jones, who owns Austin City Living.

A couple of weeks ago, Jones said, 157 homes were temporarily taken off the market, an "extremely high" number. Homes are "not getting any traction. Nobody was looking," said Jones, who said he has pulled two of his listings off the market in the past three weeks.

Jones said he is also seeing sellers reduce prices.

"In a normal market, you would see a price reduction because the home is overpriced," Jones said. "Now, you’re seeing price reductions because you’re trying to draw attention to your listing, because traffic is very slow."

The American-Statesman requested numbers from the Austin Board of Realtors for price reductions and for the number of homes that have temporarily been pulled off the market in recent weeks. The board declined to release those figures.

Reason for optimism

While things might look grim for the immediate future in the area’s housing market, industry experts say the market will bounce back once the public health crisis has abated.

Mary Anne McMahon, owner/broker of RE/MAX Posh Properties and Motto Mortgage ATX, said Austin's real estate market "is showing positive activity, despite COVID-19 and the uneasiness contributing nationwide to a real estate slowdown."

"While some homebuyers are taking a wait-and-see approach, overall the activity in Austin remains strong," McMahon said. "With many of the big tech titans moving to Austin and migration out of densely populated cities, Austin's real estate market will likely continue to thrive."

Mark Sprague, a local housing market expert, said that at the start of the coronavirus crisis in March, local sales "aggressively picked up," with buyers snapping up most of the existing inventory.

"The crisis spurred buyers to buy quicker and not negotiate as much on what has sold," Sprague said. "The challenge there was not enough inventory going into this crisis, and it is being absorbed quicker than listings are coming on the market, causing very little inventory in most price points. This leads me to believe that when we come out of this by the end of May or first of June, the market will be as robust, if not more."