San Francisco Real Estate Dances "The Bump"

As the good folks at the San Francisco Real Estate Blog noted, January is often the time when San Francisco home buyers shake off the holidays and add buying a home to the list of New Years Resolutions.

The San Francisco Real Estate Blog notes:

In years past, when the market was stronger, there was a “January Bump” in the San Francisco real estate market. The surge in activity occurred as droves of buyers came back to the market after the holiday season, while sellers lagged behind.

This meant there were more buyers than property listings, and competition ensued. Last year the San Francisco real estate market didn’t experience a January bump, but there are early signs that one is happening right now.

The blog post quotes a fellow Zephyr Realtor with a recent experience where a home his buyers tried to purchase received 3 over-asking price offers the FIRST day the home was on the market!
And his experience is not rare.
An Inner Sunset single family home received 11 offers on its offer date just 4 days after the first open house.
An Inner Mission condo sold after just 9 days on the market with 8 offers (an offer date was set on this one also.)
In fact, of the 67 reported sales at Zephyr Real Estate’s weekly meetings for January, 15 had multiple offers and 13 sold over the asking price.  Another 11 sold at the asking price.  (One caveat to mention – these are just the sales that are verbally reported – some agents aren’t able to make the meetings and those sales don’t get mentioned.  But BTW – based on those numbers, that means Zephyr represented more than 20% of the sales that occurred in January.  Um, yeah, we ROCK!) 😉
In fact, 329 properties went into contract this January.   There are still a total of 1356 properties on the market.
That means the absorption rate is just 4.1 (or it would take 4.1 months for the market to “absorb” all of this inventory – aka, it would take 4.1 months for these San Francisco listings to be bought up by buyers.)
And according to the standard guidelines that we use to determine whether we are in a Sellers’ Market (1-4 months of inventory), a Neutral Market (5-6 months of inventory) or a Buyers’ Market (7+ months of inventory) – right now, we in SF are actually in (drumroll please) a *Soft* Sellers’ Market!  😀
(Fair warning to sellers – DO NOT get greedy, this ain’t 2005!  Fair notice to buyers – there are still lots of great values out there, but a variety of circumstantial evidence including a decrease in the unemployment rate, especially in high-paying tech jobs, these good values may not be around too much longer!)
So, we in the SF Real Estate biz are enjoying the good news the January Real Estate Bump is bringing us.  And since our spirits are dancing, you may as well dance with us.  If you don’t know how to do “The Bump” – the video above will show you how. 😉