Bay Area Luxury Listings

You can learn a lot about a housing market by looking at the high end. In that respect, the Bay Area could be on the rise, as indicated by the top listing prices from Sebastopol to Santa Cruz.

Big bada BOOM!

It’s almost eight billion light years away, ten times brighter than anything in the galaxy, and it’s lasted for three years. AT2021lwx could be the largest explosion ever detected by astronomers, and it happened when the universe was just six billion years old. CNN has more numbers.

Round and round it goes

Over the past 40 years, the Bay Area housing market has seen at least four major booms. Every time, experts said the good times would never end. Every time, they were wrong. Economists call this “irrational exuberance”.

Each of these booms – or upcycles – have been followed by market corrections, sometimes with devastating consequences, such as the Great Recession. Every time, experts predicted an endless downward spiral. Every time, they were wrong.

Like any industry, housing markets run in cycles. But despite all the booms and busts, our local market has always come back stronger than ever.

Whether it’s our status as a financial, innovation, and cultural center, spectacular natural beauty and open space, and diversity, inclusion, and opportunity, Silicon Valley continues to be one of the world’s great metropolitan areas.

March 2023 Market Report

The numbers are in from March, and sales of single family homes remained slow in Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties, down as much as 40% year over year, with median prices 13% below what they were a year ago. But properties are spending more time on the market as buyers are still wary of high mortgage interest rates.

Interest rates trending down

In a sign that should bring a smile to the faces of homebuyers, daily and weekly average mortgage interest rates are on a downward trajectory in the wake of recent bank collapses. This could help to ease inflation and get the volatile market back on track in time for a summer warming.

While these data sets come from multiple sources with different methodologies to calculate their figures, the trends are extremely similar. That said, it can be difficult to predict short-term rate changes, so it’s important to keep the big picture in mind. For example, despite a spike over the past year, rates remain well below where they were in the 1990s.