March 2021 Bay Area Housing Market Update

Welcome to the Bay Area Housing Market Update from the 18th Bay Area Housing Market Townhall Webinar! Let’s take a look at what has happened in the past 30 days in the Bay Area Housing Market. Watch the video recording here.

We always compare last month’s and this month’s Santa Clara County housing stats. As you see when you compare a month ago, we actually have a little bit less closed sales, but we have 23.3% more closed sales compared to last year. In terms of condos here, we also see that there is significantly more interest in condo and townhome this year compared to last year. We have been talking about how condos and townhomes are much slower, especially condos, because people really want to have their own space. However, we started to see a big jump in the condo market at the beginning of this year, so we had 28.4% more on closed sales, and the median price has gone up as well. For the single family, the median price had gone up to 1.486 million dollars and for the condo, it had gone up to $850,000 dollars. The average days on the market for single family is about 27 days, it’s slightly more than last month, but it’s still less than a year ago. For the condo market, it stayed pretty consistent, it’s about 33 days, which is less than last month. Last year in 2020, for the past 12 months, it had been pretty slow, but now we went back to the beginning of the year, pre-COVID time. 

This was pulled on March 6 and we are trying to see how many new listings are coming onto the market. If you look at the green line, which is where 2021 is, and we compare it to 2019, the orange line, and 2020, the blue line, of course, you see that in March the number of new listings just dropped. You see the big difference between 2019 and 2020, this is what we’ve been talking about – very low inventory, right? But then you see, as 2021 started, the number of new listings has been coming on pretty strongly. Even though we have more inventory or more new listings, the pricing is still going up, so this is just an indication that the demand is still stronger than the supply, and mainly because of the low interest rate. 

Let’s take a look at San Mateo County here. There is a pretty big jump for single family prices, the median price for this month is 1.9 million dollars versus 1.6 million last month, which has gone up 18.7%, and the market moved a lot faster. I remember last year when we were doing these housing market updates, we’ve been seeing that the price has actually been coming down a little bit, a lot of people started thinking about moving out of the area. I think as the price came down, now people say – okay, the prices seem to be affordable again, or more affordable, so we do see more activities again in San Mateo County. We have slightly more homes sold in San Mateo County compared to last month. As for the condo market, the price also had gone up, and the number of days also have come down, we have more sales as well. 

Just like what we were seeing for Santa Clara County, you see that the inventory in San Mateo County has gone up, and then it started to come up as of March. We do see more and more inventory coming up. 

Now, for East Bay, these are some of the regions that we’re looking at. Pretty much all of these regions have almost 10% – 20% increase in prices. 

Let’s break it down and look at the average number of days on the market. It went from last year’s 32 days to 22 days this year. As for the number of home sales in East Bay, last year it was 943 versus 1267 this year. Literally every day we just keep hearing a lot of people moving out of a certain area, basically moving from the peninsula to the East Bay Area, because it’s a lot more affordable. 

Here is the 880 corridor, and you can see that especially the sales prices in San Leandro had gone up 23% in the month of February. Also, Hayward and Newark went up 24% and 25% respectively. Those are not just double-digit numbers, they are over 20% increases in these areas.

If you look at this big picture in all these four different regions, besides Clayton has dropped 8%, everywhere else is also positive, and many of them are double digits as well. 

Now, I know people want to know exactly what’s going on, so again this month we picked out a few offers that we have submitted to show you what the competition level has been like. Let’s look at East Bay first, in San Ramon, this is new construction. The asking price is between $950,000 and $1 million, there are 40 plus people on the waiting list waiting for the condos to come out. They are pretty much just releasing one or two units every month, so everyone is just kind of sitting there and waiting. That’s how much of the competition just for new construction development. 

In Newark, here are two examples, they are both single family homes. Look at this, 40 plus disclosures, 23 offers, and 15 offers. One went from about $1.2 million asking to over $1.45 million, while the other one was asking $1.225 million and was sold for $1.46 million, it’s a big jump. 

Now, if we look at the south Bay Area, Santa Clara single family home had about $2.2 million asking price, it had 28 disclosures, 12 offers, and the accepted offer price went over $2.5 million. In Saratoga, a single family home, the asking price was almost $2.1 million. There were 9 disclosures, which is relatively low, and they still received 5 offers and went over $2.4 million. In San Jose Berryessa, which’s north San Jose, a single family asking for $1.09 million, and they received 5 pre-emptive offers, meaning that people decided to submit offers before the deadline, and it reached close to $1.3 million. There is also a condo in San Jose, Alum Rock area, which is a little bit more to the east. The asking was $549,500 and received 4 offers that are all over the asking price. 

Palo Alto last year was a little bit slow, but this year again, a single family home asking for almost $2.5 million got 24 offers and went over $3 million. How about the peninsula? If you look at Foster City, a condo asking $820,000 received 4-5 offers and went over $920,000. The same thing for this single family home – asking $1.748 million, received 14 offers and went over $2 million. Again, you can see that when there’s a single family, you do receive a lot more offers, a lot of times they’re double digits offers. Then condos – last year was really slow, we saw a lot of condos staying on the market for 45 days, 60 days, but this year at the beginning of January we actually started seeing multiple offers, not a lot but still multiple offers coming in. So if you’re making offers, hopefully, this can give you some sense of what’s going on on the market right now. 

Thank you for reading this blog, if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us. The U.S. Housing & Economic Market, Mortgage, and Commercial Real Estate Updates will also be available soon, stay tuned!