The sales volume for condos listed for sale in San Francisco was down over 20 percent on a year-over-year basis last month, according to MLS data. At the same time, the number of condos listed for sale in the city is currently higher on a year-over-basis, albeit up by a nominal 1 percent.
The sale volume for listed single-family homes in San Francisco is running around 5 percent lower on a year-over-year basis while listings are down closer to 15 percent.
Not reflected in the numbers, the sale of any new construction condo which wasn’t listed on the MLS nor any “off-market” sales. Those sales will be counted, however, in the recorded sales report for May which should be out this week.
Have we even had a large condo project out of the gate in this cycle yet? Too bad Rincon is going leasing…I would love to see something sop up some of that demand. But the rental market needs product too, so I can’t complain. Any new inventory is good at this point.
Does the Linea count or any of the other Upper Market developments? Also a few in Hayes Valley. I lot of stuff should come online in 2015 and I’m curious to see where the market is in a year.
Sales volume down, listings up going into prime selling season … I feel I have heard this record before.
What is that supposed to mean? Because it reads like unfocused negativity and nothing more.
Down with unfocused negativity!
Up with focused rah-rah boosterism!
Still poor?
Meh. Just wanted to know what was meant. Apparently your two beers enable for magical mind reading.
I think badlydrawnbear is drawing a parallel to the last time the boom market lost momentum.
I agree the parallel is hard to make. Last run-up was led by all sectors, including, and dominated by, subprime. SF merely followed the trend. When all segments crashed, subprime lost 40 to 75% depending on areas, while SF lost 20 to 30%. SF was more resilient but it cratered like everyone else, albeit 2 years or so later.
Today the market is greatly expanding but in a limited number of areas. That’s understandable in the current context: all the wealth that had been created since the last downturn has only benefited a limited pool of people. If you take 2.5% growth distributed equally among every one, it will be very different from wealth distributed among a few lucky %. Most of this windfall is stock options, dividends, stock market profits, bonuses. Some of it is income for the knowledge workers who are on the right side of the recovery.
SF is right in the middle of this uneven distribution of wealth. And since supply is limited, prices are skyrocketing. I wish there would be some better wealth redistribution, and in some way there is: restaurants, services, more civil servants (better tax revenue). There’s still a ton of waste in all of this, and nature hates waste…
Square is doing it’s part raining all that VC money down on merchants (across the US) and Square employees locally. And that $1.2billion Uber war chest is nothing to sniff at. Some of that money will stay local, but a lot of it will be lavished on recruiting drivers all over the globe.
So there are people who read the data and news on this website who are arguing that the market is losing momentum? How?
look at the second derivative not the first.
The national market has hit a wall, and “sales drop, listings rise,” indicates the local market isn’t magically immune. As bear said above, we have heard this record before. What’s incredible is that most of the boosters won’t admit it until it’s front page news, and then they’ll say (as they said last time), “we knew all along it was going to end like this.”
As long as we stay in these ever-shorter but larger boom-and-bust cycles, the economy at large will not recover, inequality will skyrocket, and the rich will keep getting richer.
How will the rich get richer if their real estate sinks in value?
Friction in the FIRE sector.
Where have you been the last five years? Since the global economic collapse, the rich have grabbed about 95% of the economic gains, hence the burgeoning discussion of inequality. For a rentier, you seem to have a very limited understanding of the mechanisms and procedures that have increased your wealth.
True. The key is access to liquidity and financing. This gives you the opportunity to purchase assets when they they are lowest.
When the poor were losing their houses during the subprime meltdown, the well off snapped up assets. Today the poor are renting the houses they used to “own” 8 years ago.
If you think that it was all accidental and unforeseen, then you have to believe that Dimon and Blankfein are either the two stupidest or two luckiest men on the planet, or both, and that their exploding wealth is undeserved and ill-gotten, at best.
The “sales drop listing wise” that is central to the thread is negligible, and that’s pointed out in the actual verbiage. A YoY month’s data blip, and a small one. Yet you criticize outwardly that others aren’t taking a long view?
Pray Tell kind newcomer, in your long view are you saying that prices in San Francisco will never take a hit?
No. I fully expect a drop or at least a leveling off as these prices seem very tech-bubbly to me. Maybe rising rates does it? Doesn’t mean I throw the baby out with the bath water, verbally. SF continues to be an incredibly hot market that is not currently receding.
Btw, I dug up some more stats on this. May condo price medians hit a new peak last month at $995K. Months of inventory odd increase as the editor suggests, but it went from 1.2 last year to 1.4 this year. That is still INCREDIBLY low, and it is lower than the 12 month average. Oh yea, average days on the market was 29…lowest we have seen in at least a year. I’m not saying it isn’t coming, but this does not sound like a slowdown to me.