What does a waterfront home cost in the Austin area?

Waterfront is a thin, slow market next to the rest of Austin, and it got a little stronger this year. Over the last 12 months, 212 waterfront houses sold across the Austin area at a median of $1,200,000, up 10.1% from $1,090,000 the year before on 160 sales.

Homes took a median of 90 days to go under contract, down from about 101 days. The typical home sold for 91.0% of its original list price, up from 87.8%, and 52% of sold homes had cut their price at least once.

Supply is the headline. With 279 waterfront houses for sale and about 17.7 sales a month, the market holds roughly 15.8 months of inventory. That is a buyer's market by any standard measure: sellers compete for a small pool of buyers, and a home priced above the recent sales on its own body of water tends to sit.

The body of water drives the price more than anything else. We grouped last year's 212 sales by the lake or river each listing description names. Houses that name Lake Travis, 113 sales, sold for a median of $1,350,000. Lake Austin houses, 12 sales, sold for a median of $4,756,250. Blanco River houses, 13 sales, had a median of $1,427,500, and Colorado River houses, 8 sales, $780,000. The 65 listings that did not name one of these lakes or rivers sold for a median of $797,000.

By city, Spicewood led with 55 sales at a median of $1,000,000, followed by Austin with 38 sales at about $3.03 million, Wimberley and Lago Vista with 18 each at $1,267,250 and $1,406,250, and Jonestown with 10 at $1,450,000. The median home that sold had 3,062 square feet on 1.40 acres and was built in 1999.

The median waterfront house took 90 days to go under contract over the last 12 months, counted on cumulative days on market so a relisted home is not reset to zero. That compares with 54 days for all single-family houses in the same Austin-area market. Waterfront buyers are fewer, they inspect docks, bulkheads, septic systems and flood exposure, and they compare across lakes, so decisions take longer.

For sellers, pricing against the right water matters. A Lake Travis home should be priced from Lake Travis sales with similar frontage and water depth, not from a Lake Austin median three times higher.

Most waterfront houses in this market sit on the Highland Lakes chain west of the city. Lake Travis runs from Mansfield Dam past Lakeway, Spicewood, Lago Vista and Jonestown. Lake Austin is the narrow, constant-level stretch of the Colorado River between Mansfield Dam and Tom Miller Dam, lined by west Austin and Westlake. Downstream, Lady Bird Lake runs through downtown, and the Colorado continues east toward Bastrop. To the southwest, the Blanco River runs through Wimberley.

These figures are closed sales of single-family houses that the listing agent marked as waterfront in the ACTRIS MLS, across the Austin-area market this site's search covers: ACTRIS MLS listings inside a box reaching roughly 30 to 35 miles from downtown Austin, from Georgetown, Liberty Hill and Taylor in the north to San Marcos and Lockhart in the south, and from Spicewood and Wimberley in the west to Bastrop and Elgin in the east. Condos, townhomes, land and leases are excluded, as are sales under $40,000. Lake and river groupings come from the water body named in each listing description. The current period is the 12 months ending September 27, 2026, compared with the 12 months before it. Days on market are cumulative. We publish totals and medians only, never an individual home's sale price.