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https://www.mercurynews.com/2023 ... -sellers-pull-back/
Bay Area home prices spike 17% as sellers pull back
The region’s median home price hit $1.23 million in March
The busy spring home-buying season has arrived in the Bay Area — but sellers aren’t cooperating.
As the weather warms and more buyers scour Zillow for new listings, they’re finding a shortage of homes for sale. That’s ramping up competition for well-kept properties in family-friendly neighborhoods, boosting the region’s median home price by 17% to $1.23 million between February and March.
“For the right house, there’s definitely a lot of buyers,” said William Wu, 36, who along with his wife and two young children were at a crowded open house for a white four-bedroom home in the Burlingame hills with panoramic views of the San Francisco Bay. It’s estimated value is $2.5 million.
Why are so few houses available? It all comes back to interest rates.
Many homeowners who might otherwise be willing to sell had locked in mortgages before average interest rates spiked above 6% starting last year. Rates hadn’t been that high since 2008. And those potential sellers are now reluctant to give up their lower rates, often at around 3% or 4%.
“Why would you sell at that rate?” asked Lafayette real estate agent Paddy Kehoe. “It’s free money.”
The lack of homes is born out in the data. By the end of March, it would have taken just a month and a half to sell off all the remaining homes on the market, down from more than two and a half months in February, according to the California Association of Realtors. A housing market is considered balanced if it has at least four months of supply.
And as home inventory dropped, prices soared across the region.
The median sales price of existing single-family homes surged by between 11% and 16% from February to March in the counties of Santa Clara ($1.7 million), Alameda ($1.23 million), Contra Costa ($852,500) and San Francisco ($1.7 million).
The exception was San Mateo County, which saw prices drop by 10.6% to $1.86 million. The decline was likely a correction from an anomalous 28% spike in February due to a sharp increase in homes that sold for over $2 million.
Oscar Wei, an economist with the Association of Realtors, said a typical monthly increase for the region during that time of year is about 9%. While Wei expects prices to continue to climb through most of the peak home-buying season this spring and into the summer, he doesn’t foresee the record-setting price jumps of the past few years.
“The region is still being more cautious because of the economic environment and because of the tech industry, and also we don’t have 3% rates anymore,” Wei said.
On a yearly basis, the region’s median home price is actually down 13% compared to March 2022 — a reflection of tech layoffs, recession fears and rising mortgage rates battering home values during the second of last year after they ballooned during the pandemic buying boom. The rate increases spiked monthly home payments, sometimes by thousands of dollars, squeezing many would-be buyers out of the market.
For most of the past year, mortgage rates had steadily climbed due to the Federal Reserve raising the cost of borrowing throughout the economy in its fight to cool inflation. Over the past week, after about a month of moderate declines, rates ticked back up slightly, with the average rate on a typical 30-year fixed home loan increasing from 6.27% to 6.39%, according to Freddie Mac.
Many economists expect the Fed to increase the rate once more in May and then hold steady for the rest of 2023, which will likely keep mortgages around the current rate for the foreseeable future.
Mary Pope-Handy, a real estate agent in Los Gatos, said the higher rates aren’t discouraging many Silicon Valley buyers. Homes in good condition and desirable neighborhoods are going fast and becoming increasingly hard to find.
“We’re seeing a lot of multiple bids and overbids, but it’s still kind of hit and miss,” said Pope-Handy.
A higher-than-usual share of houses coming on the market are from sellers who need to offload their properties rather than those who want to, she said. Those homes are less likely to be remodeled or have modern appliances and can sit unsold for weeks or even months.
Wu, the home-seeking software engineer in Burlingame, recently sold the condo he and his wife, Amy, owned in San Francisco. They’re counting on that windfall going a long way in landing their dream home.
“We have a fair amount of cash, so then our mortgage doesn’t have to be as large,” he said. “Hopefully, that’s a leg up on some of the other buyers.” |
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