How the Best Realtors in Austin Negotiate: Inside Our Data-Driven Playbook for $1M+ Homes Before I ever sold a house in Austin, I was an options trader at the CBOE in Chicago. Every trade has a bid and an ask, and the money gets made (or lost) in the space between them. Real estate works exactly the same way. The only difference is that the spread on a $1.5 million home in Zilker or Hyde Park can be worth more than a new car! Negotiation is one of the things our clients bring

In Part 1, we laid out the questions every seller should ask before agreeing to work with a relocation company. Here's the story that prompted those questions. A longtime family friend was relocating out of state for a new job and their employer had hired a relocation company to handle the move. Even though we knew that the relocation company would require a 40% "referral" from our professional fee, we agreed to take the listing because we wanted to help our people. Here's

If you're relocating for a new job, there's a good chance your employer has offered you a "relo" service to make the move from Austin easier. New job, house full of kids and pets, boxes everywhere. A service promising to handle the logistics sounds like a gift! We've worked alongside these companies many times, and recently had an experience with longtime family friends that was challenging enough that we thought it was worth writing down. Both as a lesson learned for us and

The Berbas Group, a luxury real estate group specializing in relocations to Austin from California, New York, Illinois, and Washington, have created this relocation calculator to help you understand the cost of staying where you are versus relocating to Austin, Texas. The Berbas Group has a background in statistical arbitrage, and are well-known in Austin, Texas for not just being lifestyle realtors, but rather asset managers with a data-driven, white-glove real estate servic

Short answer: For a high earner, the financial case for leaving California for Texas is driven almost entirely by income and capital-gains taxes, not by the price of the house. California's top rate is 13.3% and it applies to both your income and your capital gains. Texas has no state income tax and no capital-gains tax at all. For someone earning several million a year, that difference is often six figures every single year, which means a multi-million-dollar Austin home

Starting in 2028, Washington will tax household income over $1 million at 9.9%, its first broad tax on high earners in a state that built its whole appeal on not having one. But for a high earner, the cost of staying is not just that annual bill. It is the opportunity cost. Every dollar you hand to the state is a dollar you cannot redeploy into something that grows. Move that capital to a no-income-tax state like Texas, put it into an Austin home that has historically app

At $5 million, you are buying a substantial, beautifully finished home in one of Austin's best neighborhoods, roughly 4,000 to 6,500 square feet with a pool, in Westlake (Eanes schools), Tarrytown, Pemberton Heights, Old Enfield, or gated Barton Creek. At $10 million, you are in trophy territory: Lake Austin waterfront with a private dock, a large new-construction estate in Westlake, or a Barton Creek compound on acreage, almost always new or extensively rebuilt.

A Chicago household earning $1,000,000 a year pays Illinois a flat 4.95% income tax, about $49,500 a year. In Texas that becomes zero. Invest that annual saving at a conservative 6%, and it compounds to roughly $652,000 in ten years, $1.82 million in twenty, and $3.91 million in thirty. And here is the part that surprises Chicago movers: Texas property tax is actually lower than Illinois's, so unlike most relocations, you tend to save on property tax too. (This is genera

A New York City household earning $1,000,000 a year pays roughly $103,000 in combined state and city income tax, every year. In Texas, that number is zero, because Texas has no state income tax and no city income tax. But the tax you stop paying is only the start of the math.

For a Bay Area household earning $1,000,000 a year, California's income tax runs about $90,000 annually at a top rate of 13.3%, which becomes zero in Texas and compounds into real money when invested. But the number that actually moves the needle for a tech family is the one-time one: California taxes capital gains as ordinary income, so a $5 million equity event (an IPO, an acquisition, a big RSU vest) costs roughly $660,000 in California state tax.