According to a soon to be released new report from Redfin, sales volume of single-family homes and condominiums in San Francisco was up 10 percent in April versus the year prior (376 transaction in April 2009 versus 412 in April 2010) but fell 22 percent versus this past March (525).
Sales volume for San Francisco single-family homes this past April (210) was up 14 percent versus April 2009 (184), but down 15 percent versus this past March (247). Sales volume for condominiums was up 5 percent on a year-over-year basis (192 in April 2009 versus 202 in April 2010) but down 27 percent versus this past March (278).
Sales volume for the greater Bay Area was down 8 percent in April on both a year-over-year and month-over-month basis.
According to Redfin agent Gina Pio Roda in San Francisco, this decline in the number of houses sold in April was driven at least in part by California buyers delaying closings to qualify for the state tax credit beginning on May 1.
“Of the eight deals we were working on at the end of April, four pushed to May, just so our clients could save another $10,000,” Ms. Pio Roda said.
Redfin’s new monthly market report draws from both Multiple Listing Services (MLS’s) and government records, and as such should reflect both listed and unlisted transactions.
UPDATE (5/14): The full Redfin report for April is now online.
UPDATE (5/14): While the transaction counts above are correct, we should have double checked the math with respect to the month-over-month changes (since corrected with no significant changes in magnitude or direction).
Also, some readers might notice a difference between the “greater Bay Area” stats reported above versus those in Redfin’s full report, we’ve excluded San Benito and Santa Cruz counties from the “Bay Area” stats in order to facilitate an upcoming comparison between Redfin’s report and Dataquick (which doesn’t include those two counties).
∙ He’s It’s Back: California’s $10,000 Homebuyer Tax Credit Returns [SocketSite]
∙ Bay Area Market Report: Single-Family Home Prices Up 5.5% MoM in April [Redfin]
Ummm…I get the comparison of April ’10 to April ’09, but I don’t understand why this April is being compared to LAST March. The seasonality between those two months is presumably different, so it seems like a poor comparison. Am I missing something here or just reading this entry wrong?
I think they mean this past March, as in March 2010.
Yes, I reread after I posted my original message, and I get it now. Either way, I don’t know how atypical a drop between March/April is. If it were earlier in the day, I’d probably have more motiviation to figure it out…but alas I don’t.
Either way, I don’t know how atypical a drop between March/April is.
I could be wrong, but typically sales volume rises from March through July, it doesn’t drop. That’s the pattern nationally and in the State of CA anyway. I also think it’s the pattern for SF too but I could be mistaken.
No, a drop from March to April has happened before.
In 2007, as the market was running out of steam from artificially induced demand (easy mortgages), and was about to take a huge swan dive, it dropped between March and April.
Looks like it has happened before 2007 as well.
looks like SF SFHs dropped March to April in 2006, when the market was still booming.
So it has dropped from March to April in 3 of the last 5 years? Seems like it is not something too unusual these days then.
UPDATE: The full Redfin report for April is now online.
early ’06 was bad. late ’06 it got hot again. i believe it was tied to a new loan product – but i don’t recall what was introduced in mid ’06. otherwise yes, april sales are almost always higher than march sales. think of it this way – to close in March you’ve got to be in contract in February or earlier and buying doesn’t take off until the weather is better with agents encouraging their sellers to wait until at least March to list
i tried to post the following comment on the redfin site but the system won’t let me
the article says redfin segments out houses and condos – but condos aren’t mentioned in the spreadsheet. also – why are San Francisco county numbers different than the San francisco numbers in the “Cities” section? Shouldn’t they be the same?
so if there’s a redfinner on here – let us know
i also found the anecdotal “bidding war” comments in their article frustrating because they were not specific as to area. while there are definitely bidding wars in SF as I was just in one, they are hardly the norm
“i also found the anecdotal “bidding war” comments in their article frustrating”
I found the general anecdotal comments to be frustrating. They made some reference to all-cash buyers, which I suspect are mostly for purported investment properties well below $500K. Without any baselines or actual statistics, it’s hard to know what is true and what’s not, so I tend to dismiss these sorts of comments.
UPDATE: While the transaction counts above are correct, we should have double checked the math with respect to the month-over-month changes (since corrected with no significant changes in magnitude or direction).
Also, some readers might notice a difference between the “greater Bay Area” stats reported above versus those in Redfin’s full report, we’ve excluded San Benito and Santa Cruz counties from the “Bay Area” stats in order to facilitate an upcoming comparison between Redfin’s report and Dataquick (which doesn’t include those two counties).
@hangemhi: thanks for your comments! This is Glenn Kelman, Redfin’s CEO. Yes, the numbers for the city and county of San Francisco vary slightly. Our city borders are also used as the borders for a listing search on Redfin.com. Our search borders include a very small buffer zone around each city so we don’t exclude any listings that users had hoped to see in their search on a city. The counties are not commonly searched on and don’t include a buffer zone, so there is a very small variance between the city border and the county border for San Francisco. In future reports, we will eliminate the buffer zone when reporting on the city of San Francisco.
As for the ancedotes about bidding wars, we also provided data on the number of offers we handled where there was a competing offer. The all-cash buyers are indeed more common at lower price points. Investor activity on bank-owned properties is significant, as all plugged-in readers here on SocketSite already know… (and sorry our blog wasn’t accepting comments last night. We just installed Disqus on our blog, so you should be able to comment directly on the Redfin post now)