- California and Bay Area home sales declined in January on an annual basis by a respective 2.9 percent and 4.6 percent.
- The median sales price for an existing single family home in the nine-county Bay Area was $809,900, a gain of 10.9 percent from January 2017.
- Home prices in Silicon Valley counties rose by about 25 percent year over year, among the highest rates of appreciation in California.
Bay Area real estate markets began 2018 on a familiar note, with supply constraints pushing up home prices and forcing more buyers to inland counties.
The latest home sales report from the California Association of Realtors says that there were 388,000 existing single family homes statewide in January on a seasonally adjusted annualized basis, a decline of 2.9 percent from one year earlier.
The sales volume decrease was particularly pronounced at the low end of the market, with sales of homes priced less than $300,000 dropping by 17.2 percent from January 2017. In the nine county Bay Area, January home sales were down by 4.6 percent year over year.
A persistent shortage of housing inventory and continued affordability crunch is beginning to eat away at the market as buyers struggle to find available homes for sale, CAR President Steve White said.
As such, we’re seeing a shift in sales toward inland areas such as San Bernardino County in Southern California, and Placer, San Joaquin, Sacramento, and Stanislaus counties, which are all adjacent to the inventory and price challenged San Francisco Bay Area.
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