August Bay Area Housing Numbers

Hot off the e-presses, the August bay area real estate numbers from dataquick are in. Although the volume is down a bit from last year's record numbers, values have continued to climb.

Houses in Alameda county have risen 17.9% & homes in Contra Costa county have risen 21.2% in the past year.

Here's the article.

A few snippets:

Bay Area home prices continued their steady upward climb in August as sales remained at near-record levels, the result of continued demand and unchanging mortgage interest rates, a real estate information service reported.

"We're a bit surprised at how stable the market is in all categories. Usually one segment of the market will be outperforming the others. Right now, though, the same trends apply to all parts of the market from entry-level on up to the prestige market. This stability means that the market will probably stay strong at least through the end of the year," said Marshall Prentice, DataQuick president.

However, one item that the report doesn't take into account is the rising level of inventory.

Within our office, we've been tracking the ratio of pending/contingent listings to active listings. Above 1 is considered a seller's market & below 1 is considered a buyers market.

I don't put much weight into the individual cities' numbers from week to week because I prefer a larger sample size. But one thing for certain is that it is slowing down throughout the east bay. Overall, the ratio has steadily declined from 1.19 on July 12th to 0.81 yesterday.

I'm not entirely sold on the concept of a housing bubble, but the market is slowing and these numbers back it up.

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