Interesting Facts about Bay Area Real Estate from the San Jose Mercury News. 4/27/2017

The housing supply may be low, but competition among spring-season buyers continued to drive up home prices across the Bay Area in March — for the 60th consecutive month.

The median price for a home in the nine-county region rose 9.1 percent year-over-year to $709,000, according to the CoreLogic real estate information service. And sales were brisk, given the chronically low inventory: 7,287 new and resale houses, condos and townhomes were sold — a whopping 51.5 percent increase over February 2017 and a 4.4 percent increase over March 2016.

 

“The San Francisco Bay Area’s housing market showed renewed strength in March, with the strongest sales for that month in five years and the sharpest year-over-year increase in the median sale price since January 2016,” said Andrew LePage, research analyst with CoreLogic. “A February-to-March spike in home sales is a seasonal norm, but this year’s nearly 52 percent jump was among the highest on record.”

 

LePage theorized that “job growth and the stock market run-up this year are among the factors that have stoked sales. It’s unclear whether heavy rains might have delayed some winter activity, resulting in more deals that closed in March. It’s also possible that some people moved up their 2017 purchase plans because they feared mortgage rates would keep rising.”

In Santa Clara County, home sales were up 5.9 percent on a year-over-year basis, whiIe they increased 6.5 percent in San Mateo County. In the East Bay, sales rose 10.6 percent in Alameda County and 2.2 percent in Contra Costa County.

And these were the median home prices: $899,500 in Santa Clara County (up 8.4 percent year-over-year); $1,052,500 in San Mateo County (up 11.7 percent); $730,000 in Alameda County (up 13.7 percent); and $545,000 in Contra Costa County (up 8.2 percent).

San Francisco’s market was less robust: Sales were down 5.3 percent and the median price dropped 4.3 percent from a year earlier to $1,100,000.

Here are a few highlights from CoreLogic’s data on single family home sales transactions, which were pricey and brisk.

Bay Area sales of single family homes were up 7.3 percent from a year earlier, and the median price rose 11.2 percent to $745,000.

In Santa Clara County, sales were up 12.3 percent and the median price rose to $1,050,000, an 11.5 percent year-over-year gain. In San Mateo County, sales rose 13.1 percent and the median topped off at $1,215,000, up 3.8 percent.

In Alameda County, single family sales rose 8.7 percent while the median price increased 13.5 percent to $772,000. In Contra Costa County, sales were up 2.5 percent as the median jumped 9.9 percent to $550,000.