The San Francisco Bay Area real estate market had begun to rebound in the first two months of the year 2020, with strong buyer demand, often with multiple offers, after a flattening of prices in 2019. But the shelter-in-place (SIP) and stock market tumble caused by uncertainty of the pandemic slowed  listings and sales.

Just last week real estate agents and other professionals who are deemed as ‘essential workers’ are allowed to work with the CDC guidelines. With these new strict guidelines real estate agents can not show open houses, give tours and must not show homes with sellers who are still residents of the property. Empty residential properties can be shown with a single agent and with only two prospective buyers. Virtual tours using video (real-time or recorded) is highly encouraged (more on Virtual Agents here).

As one can suspect, this has caused much disruption in the buying and selling of homes but it has not prevented sales by any means! Here’s a snapshot of the most important metrics to keep you informed on the real estate landscape, it includes sold homes, new listings, Transactions Fell Through (TFT) and withdrawn homes. These graphs are gathered and summarized for all five MLSListings’ Counties (San Mateo, Santa Clara, Monterey, San Benito and Santa Cruz Counties) by Aculist/ MLSListings.

Interesting to note is that despite the fact that there is a -25% difference between last year and this year’s new properties on the market, there is -14% difference of sold. This could be because it usually lags 30 days (entered escrow around that time). But not surprising we see an increase of TFT (40%), cancelled (34%) and withdrawn (87%) from last year.

Here we see a big difference between the new 2019 listings in blue vs. the new 2020 listings in orange after SIP.

Here we find a fairly regular pattern between the sold listings in 2019 vs  2020 (by the week). It will be very interesting to note what will happen in the next two weeks.

Until then we wish you good health and take the necessary precautions to keep you and your family well!

Questions? Text me if you have any plans on selling, buying or investing in 2020. Feel free to ask for a complimentary market analysis and we can discuss your needs!

(831) 346-2743 text/voice anytime

lmacfarlane@intero.com

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