Thinking about buying a house or refinancing one you already own? Short-term and long-term interest rates have hit all-time lows. According to Freddie Mac, the weekly average on a 30-year mortgage was 3.23% on April 30. The same rate was at 4.94% as recently as November 2018.
Hours ago, the reality we've been experiencing in Silicon Valley for the past few days became real for the entire state, as Governor Gavin Newsom put all of California on lockdown. KQED has the full story and what we should expect.
Many cities have placed moratoriums on evictions and foreclosures during the COVID-19 crisis, and now the Federal Housing Finance Agency is ordering Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to follow suit. Get the scoop from HousingWire.
Mayor Sam Liccardo joined public, private, and nonprofit leaders on Wednesday to announce the formation of a multi-pronged initiative to respond to the coronavirus and its impacts on our community. Get more from NBC Bay Area.
If you’re headed out on a supply run and you’re under 65, have an extra cup of coffee and give our seniors a chance to enjoy some added safety during special shopping hours at many Bay Area supermarkets, including Safeway and Whole Foods. Read all about it in SFGate.
It sounds like a contradiction in terms, but some of our neighbors are making the most out of their time at home during the coronavirus crisis. The Palo Alto Weekly has the scoop on a variety of coping mechanisms.
Having trouble keeping active at home and burning off those extra calories from eating takeout and frozen pizza during the coronavirus shelter-in-place? USA Today has seven FREE ways to get your workout on while you’re stuck in the house.
That's it. That's the headline. What an amazing story from CNN, and any one of us could replicate it in our community. All it takes is some ingenuity and a little tech savvy. Sounds like a job for the Chic 'n' the Geek!
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.
