This week the California Association of Realtors released new Bay Area home sales figures, finding that, in June, the price of a house declined year over year in every Bay Area county—that is, except for San Francisco, which saw prices surge.
The CAR data, which reflects MLS sales of single-family homes, found a median price of more than $1.76 million for an SF house in June, an 8.8 percent hike from this time last year, when the figure was $1.62 million.
The price also went up 3.8 percent compared to May, which was a 4.8 percent increase year over year. April’s figures saw prices decline in SF year over year, but only by 1.1 percent—noteworthy at the time, but seemingly only a blip on the radar.
At the same time, prices across other Bay Area counties declined significantly, down 8.1 percent (to $960,000) from June 2018 for the combined region.
The drop is even bigger if you factor out SF, since all eight other counties saw year-over-year drops, ranging from a barely noticeable 0.4 percent in Solano County to more robust six percent in Sonoma.
San Mateo County had the highest median prices besides SF at $1.62 million, down from more than $1.65 million last year and $1.76 million the previous month.
As usual, it doesn’t pay to fret to much about the numbers from just one month or even a couple of months, as sharp and dramatic changes are often anomalies; a real trend needs more time (and perspective) to develop.
These numbers do track with those released last week by the SF-based real estate group Compass, which estimated a roughly $1.7 million average for an SF house and $1.3 million for a condo.
Although those medians are up compared to June of 2018, in a more general sense they represent essentially a 12-month break even, as Compass economist Patrick Carlisle noted that “both houses and condos are basically back up to the peak prices they hit last year at this time.”
Prices wobbled up and down since then, but have now ended up back where they were, at least in San Francisco.
One other thing worth noting is that the number of homes sold in SF did drop drastically year over year in June, down 21.1 percent as part of a year-long trend in similar declines.
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