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July’s sale inventory lowest since 2011
And that makes it a year.
A slide in the number of homes sold across the Bay Area that began in July of 2018 stretched through its 12th consecutive month at the end of July 2019, according to figures from the Orange County-based data firm Core Logic.
July was also the third straight month where home prices declined compared to the same time the previous year, although prices increased in San Francisco.
Across all nine counties, 7,404 homes sold in July, down 2.2 percent from the 7,570 figure last year. The median price declined 4.1 percent, from $850,000 to $815,000.
Note that this is the lowest sales inventory figure for July since 2011, which moved only 7,014 homes.
“Last month, six of the region’s nine counties logged year-over-year declines in their medians ranging from two percent to 4.6 percent percent, marking the first month since February 2012 in which this many counties posted annual declines,” economist Andrew LePage writes.
The biggest slip in the number of homes sold was in Alameda County, down eight percent to 1,512. Sales volume was up in a majority of counties, dropping only in Alameda, Contra Costa County, Santa Clara County, and San Francisco. But those four counties account for the majority of homes in the Bay Area.
The largest decline in median home price was in Napa County, down 4.6 percent. San Francisco saw its median for July up year over year by 3.8 percent to $1.35 million (a difference of only about $50,000).
Note that Core Logic is an outlier with some of these figures, as sources like the California Association of Realtors (CAR) and the real estate group Compass both found SF prices down in July.
However, CAR only measures single-family homes specifically, and Compass analyzes house and condos individually, whereas Core Logic combines sales of all types of homes into a single statistic, which creates a much different trend.
