October 2022 Bay Area 4 Counties Housing Market Update

Welcome to our Oct 2022 Bay Area Housing Market Updates! Find out the latest Bay Area housing market stats and updates in Santa Clara County, San Mateo County, Alameda County, Contra Costa County.

As always, we compare four counties, Santa Clara, San Mateo, Alameda and Contra Costa Counties and we look at the months of inventory. We've been having considering going up on the months of inventory to peaked at July, I think we have been talking about for the last few months around June we think the market's going to slow down, the summer is the best time to buy. Now, that we look back, July was truly the best time. There was pretty much no movements at all. 2.1 is not that bad but still like there was just so little movement at the time. I do know that a lot of buyers were able to get really good deals. October, we have not had a full month's data yet, right now it's at 3.5, but once we finish out the month, we might have a different numbers just like September, last month, we looked at was like 4.7 I think but now that the whole month was over it came back down to 1.7 which is much less than July. 

In terms of the median days to sell, we have come down a little bit to 18 days on the market. 

In terms of how competitive it is, it's just right around asking price right now. 

We talked about a number of listings withdrawn or canceled and as you know that around May also we saw this should have numbers of listings withdrawn or canceled because everybody was just so shocked about the market change; but in September, we started seeing a little less listings being withdrawn or canceled.

Then list price decrease, same thing as you see list price decrease, Santa Clara County, we see 561 compared to 688 listings last month. We do have a little bit more still in San Mateo County but we do have less in Alameda County and also Contra Costa County. We definitely see a uptick on activities as soon as the summer was over. In September, we saw quite a bit of buyers came back onto the market, not a lot like the beginning of the year, don't get me wrong, but it was not, I almost want to use the word "dead" in July because even we had open houses sometimes nobody even come in. But then now September came back and the market definitely has come back a little bit.

We also have less transactions fell through in September compared to August. 

In terms of the median price range, Santa Clara County has come down from $1.65 million last month to $1.58 million. San Mateo County, it actually gone up a little bit from $1.74 million last month to $1.8 million and Alameda County from $1.2 million up to $1.215 million and then Contra Costa County from $875,000 that go down to $835,000.

In terms of offer, the Battleground, these are some of the offers we've seen. It's really, really, really extreme right now on some of the market, depends on the locations. If you have really good locations in terms of good school district, is close to offices like Cupertino, Sunnyvale but you have good schools, it doesn't have any deficiency as if like you are on a major road, you don't have like a bad floor plan, then your property still have multiple offers and can still sell above asking price but if your property have some kind of deficiencies, bad floor plan, missing a garage or the floor plan just doesn't make sense and if your location is not as good then all of a sudden your property just sitting on the market for a long time. So, we definitely see quite a drastic difference between those type of properties. So as an example look out Sunnyvale, there you go 41 offers for this property, single family homes and is sold just below $2.6 million cash offer and for that property the highest wasn't even $2.6, the highs was actually $2.68 but they took a cash offer because they didn't want to take the risk of taking a finance offers but then you've seen like for example something a single family in Central San Jose doesn't have a very good school district, even though they received numerous offers because of the less ideal floor plan, all the offers are below asking price. 

So, these are some of the examples for you guys to reference and to understand how the market works right now.

Lastly, these are the mortgage projections from different agencies and the one that I kind of blow my mind right now is Mortgage Bankers Association, it just seems like their projection is still so low even though they had already gone up in terms of like comparing last month projection to this month, their mortgage rate is still really low. Same thing for Freddie Mac. Although, I have to say, Freddie Mac this one is from July, so I guess they were still a little bit behind but Fannie Mae, in September their projections is like high fives but what we can see is that they all believe that about 2023 3Q, 4Q is kind of coming back down. National Association Realtor seems to be the most in line with what's happening right now 2022 6%, they believe that 2023 1Q is going to go up to 6.5% and then 2023 2Q 6.4% and 3Q 6.3% and then 6.1% on the mortgage rates.

Thank you again for reading our market updates! Check out our new Bay Area Housing Market Townhall Lending Series on YouTube, find out how to prepare for your home mortgage application, and how to work with the lender to make your offer the strongest. Register here to join us live every third Wednesday of the month!