Current Real Estate Market Conditions

Here is your Real Estate Market update for the San Francisco Bay area. This article will speak mainly of the South Bay, North Bay and Southern Alameda Counties which are the counties that are making the most notable recoveries in housing prices.

Inventory is down almost 50% over this time last year. Believe it or not we are actually in a Seller's Market at this time. Hard to believe, huh?

With so much bad press about the housing market for the last two years it is hard to believe that things have changed so much so let me explain what is driving or pushing this. First, most of the press we see on the "housing problem" is based on national figures and the rest of California is included in that. However in the Bay Area we have a different situation. We have a lot of areas that are "landlocked" due to the proximity of mountains and the San Fransisco Bay "locking" areas in from any further housing growth. We also have certain demographic cultural ideologies that cause those demographics to buy and rarely sell. For example for at least 7 years the city of San Jose has not had an ethnic majority. In other words no one ethnic group comprises 50% or more of the population in the City of San Jose. Interesting, huh?

So when you have certain ethnic cultures in an area and they buy and rarely sell, then that substantially stablizes that housing market and causes values to go up.

Geoffrey Gault,
Real Estate Market Watch
www.geoffreygaultrealestate.com