Did you know? The “flip rate” in the U.S. just reached 10.9% of all home sales. That’s because flipping today is less risky and less speculative than it was a decade ago, and more corporate flippers are entering the market: 41.2% in 2018 compared to just 11.4% in 2005. Learn more
– The Geek
It feels like the market is heating up again. I recently worked with a fellow agent on a single-family listing in the Cuesta Park neighborhood of Mountain View. The home listed at $1.87M. Yesterday, on the offer date, we had 21 bids with the highest at $2.22M. As you’d expect, the seller accepted without contingencies. but we were all shocked by the competition.
Ever since September 2018, the market has seemed to slow, so why the sudden jump with this property? Well, there are a couple of factors at play here. First, if you look at the graph below, supply is very low compared to one year ago. When there is an extreme imbalance of supply and demand, you naturally see price hikes.
The second factor is seasonality. Late winter/early spring is generally a great time for sellers, as buyers start to look for houses after the holidays and before the spring break. And with inventory so low right now, it’s like a perfect storm!
Please contact us if you want to know the inventory level in your neighborhood or a particular city that piques your interest.
– The Geek
We hear a lot about “median sales price”, but what does that really mean? Well, the median is the middle number of a data set when you arrange it from high to low. That means the median sales price represents the price at which half the properties in an area sell higher and the other half lower.
Okay, so how is that different from the “average sales price”? The average sales price is calculated by adding up all the prices for home sales in a specific area within a specified time frame and dividing that total by the number of properties sold.
Median and average sales can be valuable sets of data for both buyers and sellers in helping them set their budgets. However, it’s important to remember that the average sale price may be skewed due to outliers in the data – i.e.properties sold at prices far higher or lower than typical for the area.
Some of the most expensive communities in the country are clustered on the border of Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties, in the heart of the Peninsula – though both counties contain other, very expensive markets. The charts below offer a look at the combined markets.
As you can see here, the combined median house sales price in Q3 2019 was down 5% from Q3 2018, but still 3% higher than Q3 2017.
A decline in competition for new listings is illustrated in the second chart, as the market turned from a high average overbidding percentage, to an average sales price below list price.
What does this mean for you? Send us an email. We’d be happy to walk you through it.
