Forget about looking for Black Market home prices in the San Francisco Bay Area. There aren’t any.
Online real estate magnet, Trulia, looked for Black Market prices among the nation’s 100 largest housing markets and found that San Francisco, San Jose and Oakland were the least likely places to find price reductions on homes for sale.
Felipe Chacon, the Trulia economist in charge of this Black Friday study, said, “With median prices topping $1M, these are very expensive markets and they’re very tight markets. There’s just not a lot of reasons for sellers to cut prices right now.”
The national average for homes that saw one price cut is 13.4%. In San Francisco, 6.3% of homes listed for sale saw a price cut. That percentage is the lowest in the country. San Jose had the second lowest percentage, 7.2%, of homes listed for sale that saw a price cut. Oakland had the third lowest percentage with 8.5% listed homes seeing a price cut.
Trulia discovered that, over the last six years, August is Black Friday month in the country’s housing markets. 13.9% of all homes had listing prices reduced at least once. Again, the Bay Area housing market hasn’t seen quite the same bargains nor has the Bay Area seen such “bargains” with the same frequency as other parts of the country.
August in Oakland saw 8.3% listing prices reduced once and August in San Jose saw 9.2% listing prices reduced once. San Francisco waited until October for its Black Friday but saw only 7.6% of its listing prices reduced once.
Remember that numbers are just one of the factors to consider in the Bay Area housing market. Other factors include the Bay Area’s super competitive nature, its historically low housing supplies and its well-heeled, international buyers who bid up prices on the homes that are available.
Overbidding is the Bay Area’s new normal. Just one example…a modest house in Sunnyvale, just down the road from Apple’s spaceship operation, sold for $782,000 over its list price.
Throughout the Bay Area and especially in Silicon Valley where home prices are considered to be “mythic,” the median price in over a dozen East Bay cities (Fremont, Alameda, Berkeley, Walnut Creek, Pleasanton, etc.) now exceeds $1M.
One final caveat…year-end in October, San Jose saw 7.2% price cuts, down from 9.9% the previous year. This percentage is the lowest in the country, matched by Las Vegas, with San Francisco and Oakland closely following.
Black Market prices in the Bay Area? No way.
