The average SF home sells in 35 days

If a “For Sale” sign pops up outside a San Francisco house, it’s advisable to run rather than walk and to skip unnecessary chores along the way, or else the place might not still be around when you get there.

Insurance company Nationwide released a report this week compiling MLS data about home sales in the U.S. and determined that San Francisco had the fourth fastest-selling homes in the country in 2017.

Altogether, the average San Francisco home spent 35 days on the market, according to Nationwide and it source, the data firm CoreLogic.

Only Colorado Springs (34 days); the Denver metro area (33 days); and the Kennewick-Richland, Washington area (31 days) beat SF in terms of speed of sale. Note that Kennewick has a population of only about 80,000 and thus a smaller sample size of home sales to draw on than a place like San Francisco or Denver.

Nationally, the report concludes that the average number of days on the market for the U.S. in general was 67 days, down from 120 in 2011.

Unfortunately, since last year’s report around the same time, Nationwide doesn’t include this particular statistic, so it’s impossible to compare whether it increased or decreased year over year using the same methods.

Photo by Alexander Demyanenko

However, we can look at an alternative source: The listing site Realtor.com, which updates its statistics about home sales in each metro area monthly.

As of February 2018, Realtor reports that the average San Francisco home sold in a heartstopping 21 days, roughly a quarter the national average of 83 days.

By comparison, in June of 2017 the same statistic on Realtor was just 24 days, which was already perilously fast in that case. That figure was flat year over year at the time but has somehow managed to decline since then.

The wide margin between the two different reports could be because Nationwide and CoreLogic took the average for all of 2017, whereas Realtor employs only figures for the beginning of 2018.

Note also that while Realtor uses the SF-Oakland-Hayward metro area, Nationwide’s figures represent the separate and drastically different SF-Redwood City metro. Finally, Realtor only concerns itself with listings on its own site, which are not 100 percent comprehensive, whereas CoreLogic rounded up homes on MLS.

For a third opinion, the real estate group Paragon’s most recent Bay Area housing report provided an average of just 23 days on the market for a house in San Francisco, and 36 days for a condo.

That’s an increase of two days for SF condos year over year, but a decline of an incredible nine days in how long a house sticks around compared to last year.

• Home Report, Q1 2018 [Nationwide]
• Home Report, Q1 2017 [Nationwide]
• US Home Market Research [Realtor]
• San Jose Homes Sell Faster [Curbed SF]
• Bay Area Market Report [Paragon]