About Austin's University Hills

The University Hills neighborhood in Austin, Texas has an interesting history when it comes to sales. Even before the wave of remodels in Central East Austin that began around 2004, University Hills had seen serious interest on the part of homeowners and speculators alike.

The location is convenient to downtown via I-35 as well as the shopping areas around Cameron Rd and the shops at the new Mueller shopping district.

University Hills homes for sale are also surrounded by other, smaller subdivisions that you should check out if you are at all interested in living in that neighborhood. Manor Hills, University Park --- they are all great options when looking for homes for sale in the 78723 zip code!

Here's a few of the fantastic single family homes for sale in 78723! Follow the links below to contact me about any of these fabulous home options.

Hook em horns! I've no affiliation with the University of Texas (well, I have a t-shirt as my wife used to be an advisor there), but I do have a strong interest in University Hills, 78723. Why? well one reason is that my wife used to live there. With me. Not all that many moons ago.

We were looking for our first home, and the choices that were somewhat close to town in our price range where 78745 and 78723. Simple as that.

The home we choose was a fixer upper, and it was near the site of the old airport, which was threatening to spring to life at any moment in a mixed-used urban village flash of smoke and mirrors. So it seemed like a good bet. The other thing that was different was the size of the lot we could afford - a third of an acre, covered in tall trees provided a shady retreat for our pooch, and indeed, for us.

The home was also larger than the comparable homes we were looking at - in essence, we bought a large home on a large lot, with a cool split-level layout. The 1960s rancher was split over several levels as the homes are built on the hills. Not all that far from the University. Hence, University Hills.

Now I look at the area, which had peak pricing in around 2007/2008 and I see real value. The lots are still the same - ranging typically between 0.25 and 0.4 acres - though the trees are a little older. Can't be a bad thing, right? The homes are a little older, so that now they may need a little more TLC. Nothing a good inspector, an energy audit, and a bit of negotiation can't take care of though. But the prices are really quite outstanding right now.

What do I think is going to happen to the prices as the Town Center at Mueller and the Mueller Grocery Store get put into place? As the hospital expands (it's building another wing) and as the employment base goes up? Well, my crystal ball says that prices are likely to do better here than in a suburb. As gas prices rise, the closer to amenities the better.

So what am I selling here? Some unsolicited advice about buying close into Austin, or getting a large home with a deck to expand onto as the evenings cool and you want to hear the rustling of a breeze amongst your trees? I guess not.

As luck would have it, and if you've got this far, I am marketing some homes for sale in University Hills Austin.

If you want your own forest, or a cool split level home, or a remodeled ranch home, or a fixer upper, these are worth a second or third look - 5 homes under $180,000, all close to the pool at Dottie Jordan,

Give me a call on 512 215 4785 if you want to talk University Hills!

Garreth Wilcock is an English Realtor in Austin.

There are particular pitfalls to avoid when selling a home in University Hills, Austin, TX. Here are the top five things to avoid if you want to sell your home for the greatest return.

Pitfall 1: Leaving the Leaves We are fortunate to have so many mature trees in University Hills - but that often means that piles of leaves can quickly mound up in the yards. The size of the lots is large for East Austin, and buyers want to see them as an asset, not something that requires lots of work. Keeping your yard free of leaves helps buyers see the space. De-leaf before the photographer comes, and keep the leaves away while the home is on the market.

Pitfall 2: Leaving Rover on Guard In a recent National Association of Realtors survey, barking dogs in a home are the number one reason why a buyer won't even go in the door. If the buyers can't see inside, they can't appreciate the home, and you won't see any offers. If you can keep your dogs with family while you're showing your home, all the better.

Pitfall 3: Offering a "Foundation Allowance" With the clay rich soil and the homes built on the hills, we often run into foundation challenges. If your home isn't level, you'll need to offer something more concrete than an allowance to sell your home. To quell the doubts in a buyer's mind, get several estimates from foundation repair companies who give lifetime transferable warranties and give them to your REALTOR®.

Pitfall 4. Not Staging Your Home. A home that has been professionally staged will typically sell for 6%-10% more than one that hasn't, so to get the most of your home equity, work with a REALTOR® who provides staging services, or get a recommendation for someone who gets results in your area. It doesn't necessarily involve a large amount of expense, but it does require effort.

Pitfall 5. Padding the Price It's tempting to pad the list price of your home "to allow for negotiation later". The reality of a home that is overpriced to start with is that it will sit on the market for a longer time, and may end up netting you less money in the long run. Setting the price correctly with no padding will yield better offers faster.

There are many other aspects to consider when selling your East Austin home, and if you want a free consultation, give me a call on 512 694 8873.

Garreth Wilcock is a REALTOR® with the Pinnacle Group at Keller Williams. He specializes in Central and East Austin Real Estate. Call 512 694 8873 if you want a free valuation of your home or contact him here.

Austin is less walkable than Houston. So says a recent report from walkscore.com, a site which ranks neighborhoods for a walkability score - how easy it is to get around on foot. The method sees Austin at a walkability of 49 compared to Houston's 51. I was fairly surprised at this result - my travel experiences in Houston have mostly been vehicularly based. So I took a look at their methodology and applied it to an area I have lived and worked in - the Upper East Side - University Hills.

Walkscore is one of a number of sites designed to help homebuyers with geographic information. It uses some Web 2.0 principals and integrates publicly available amenity information with geographic data. In theory homebuyers who know nothing of an area can summon up charts and graphs and clue themselves in. Now don't call me a Luddite - (though I was born in Nottingham, England, the birthplace of the Luddite movement which sought to fight changes due to new technology). But sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn't quite work.

Walkscore uses the following algorithm: based on a given address, it checks to see if the closest amenity in each group of amenities (schools, movie theatres, grocery stores etc) is within a range of 0.25 to 1 mile of that address. It gives points based on the closeness of each of these closest amenities. One of it's self professed drawbacks is that it doesn't take into account local geography - say there is a body of water or Highway 183 between you and a school, it would still assume you could walk to it.

Within the city, it ranks neighborhoods' walkability - you can see the one for Austin, TX, here. The neighborhood of University Hills is given a score of just 43 out of 100, compared to 73 for Upper Boggy Creek - the area between Mueller and I35. I plugged in the address of Dottie Jordan Park - a park in University Hills, 78723, to see what amenities showed up.

For the most part, the amenities were correctly categorized (although The Simplifiers is an event planning business, not a restaurant). The Intrigue Bar suffered from having a huge highway between it and the target address - not very walkable. The movie theatres were a little miscategorized but by and large, I was impressed with the accuracy of the data. Score: Walkscore: 1, Luddites: 0! I also checked a few addresses in Hyde Park - which scores a whopping 77 walkability, in Upper Boggy Creek and around Central Austin and all of the data looked reasonably accurate.

So how could one explain that a sprawling city like Houston is more walkable than Austin? According to the US Census Bureau, Houston is denser than Austin, and if you look at the walkability rankings for Houston, there appears to be a continuous mix of neighborhoods. Six areas have a walkability higher than 70, whereas in Austin there are 20 similarly scoring areas. But in Austin there are a few areas that are extremely unwalkable - around McKinney Falls Parkway in southeast Austin for example. Areas that aren't walkable have precious few residents - less than 5000 in the area around McKinney Falls. So it looks like Austin is penalized due to it's state park!

In summary, I think the address-based walkability data is useful, though some specific amenity information may be inaccurate. If you take averages based on a large scale area, your mileage may vary.

Garreth Wilcock is a real estate agent in Austin Texas. He enjoys blogging about areas like University Hills.