Down 6.9 percent on a year-over-year basis through the first four months of the year, marking the slowest start to the local market since 2010, home sales in San Francisco ticked up in April.
But the pace of sales had already started to slow by early May. And pending home sales activity in San Francisco is now running 10 percent lower on a year-over-year basis with inventory levels are on the rise and 30-year mortgage rates having dropped under 4 percent and nearly marked a two-year low.
I don’t think so. SF sales May 2019 look dead even to May 2018 at 612 sales, actually. So it’s likely a given that it will wind up being minutely higher as some realtors who neglected to update from pending to sold and went on vacation somewhere, updates a few MLS pages ….
Our pending sales metric is a leading, not lagging, indicator of the market. May sales are primarily a function of the contract signings which occurred in April through mid-May, when the pace was still up (but then started to slip).
The pace today is an indicator of current contract activity which will impact the sales totals in June/July.
I see. Your sales metric is a leading indicator. Yet as late as this morning you use past tense language to speak of May, incorrectly. And somehow that’s not anything to talk about. Because you’re the smartest guy in your room. Got it.
Again, “the pace of sales had already started to slow by early May.” But the pace of contract signings in May is a leading indicator for June. Just as the pace in April was an indicator for May.
And again, May will ultimately display a YOY gain over a peak year.
Not quite. There were nearly 900 sales in May of 2004, nearly 800 in May of 2005 and nearly 700 in May of 2006. But a year-over-year bump shouldn’t catch any plugged-in readers by surprise, neither should a subsequent slowdown.
Oh I see. Volume alone, that is now the way you parse for the term peak year. In a wildly different market no less. Typical.
In related news, I recently checked out a couple of homes in Pebble Beach that were still around 30% underwater from the last bubble. File under ‘Real Estate Only Goes Up”.