Back in May, real estate site Trulia suggested that homes sales in the Bay Area might be slowing down.
Although San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose were the three fastest moving housing markets in the country, they were not as lightning quick as they used to be.
But now it’s July, and other housing sites have dropped a raft of data to say: Not so fast.
Trulia competitor Zillow, for example, reports that San Francisco sells homes nearly twice as fast as the national average. In Anytown, USA, a home listed on Zillow sells in 78 days. In San Francisco, it’s 43.
That is indeed a slowdown from this same time last year. But since the difference is only a day, it’s probably within the margin of error to say that there’s no real change at all.
Since we should never take just one site’s word for anything, we turned to Realtor.com to see if their own data pool concurs. Realtor homes nationwide seem to be selling significantly faster in general: That site’s US average is 65 days.
But Realtor does agree that the Bay Area blows that comparably turtle-like rate out of the water. San Francisco’s median age of inventory is only 25 days. That’s actually a tiny bit faster than last year.
The drastic difference in the two site’s timelines compared to each other may just because they’re measuring different areas: Zillow narrows it down to individual cities, while Realtor lumps together huge areas. Although of course, we always expect different sites to have different figures.
For a contrasting third opinion, Paragon’s most recent figures show a pretty significant four day drag on the amount of time it takes to sell a single family home: 15 days in June 2015, but 19 days in 2016. But it’s still just 19 days, so who’s sweating it?
Condos, on the other hand, see an even bigger drag, from just 17 days all the way up to 27.
So do this chorus of analysts agree on anything? Two conclusions: One, by any measure, homes in San Francisco and the Bay area still get into the loving hands of buyers really, really fast.
And two, Seattle is gunning for our number one spot at a dizzying pace.
Back in May, Trulia marked it as the fastest non-Bay Area market. Zillow says its selling speed is now 47 days, just behind ours, and down three days from last year. And Realtor records a Seattle average of 25 days, down six just since May. Yowza.
- Q2 2016 Market Report [Zillow]
- Average SF Home Sells in 22 Days [Curbed SF]
- Realtor Data Portal, San Francisco [Realtor]
- Market Update, San Francisco [Paragon]