Home Listings Across Much of the Bay Area Go Stale

More than half of the home listings across the Bay Area have gone stale, having sat more than a month with no takers.

Across Alameda, Contra Costa, San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties, 53 percent of the home listings in June had been on the market for 30 days or more without a sales contract, SiliconValley.com reported, citing a report from Redfin.

The number of homes awaiting buyers for a month or more was 6.5 percent higher than a year earlier.

Nationally, the number of aging listings in June was 64.7 percent, nearly 9 percent higher than last year.

Home Listings Across Much of the Bay Area Go Stale — Sheharyar Bokhari, a senior economist at Redfin (Redfin)

“Sellers are not finding buyers as quickly as they used to,” Sheharyar Bokhari, a senior economist at Redfin, told the online affiliate of the San Jose Mercury News. “Home prices have not really fallen, because inventory across the country has gone into a really low level, especially last year.”

If there are fewer homes, why aren’t buyers rushing to make offers? Blame the sellers, real estate experts say. Home sellers have priced their properties too high relative to what the market can support.

Higher prices combined with high interest rates means larger mortgage payments.

As a result, home buyers who refuse to swallow larger payments are leaving homes on the market for longer periods hoping that sellers will cut their prices.

But there’s little incentive for them to do so if home sellers would be trading pandemic-era interest rates of between 2 and 3 percent to buy a new home at 7 percent, or 6.8 percent, Bokhari said.

Bay Area sellers in Alameda and Contra Costa counties saw the highest year-over-year increases in stale listings.

Nearly 53 percent of Alameda County listings had been on the market for more than 30 days, a 7.6 percent increase since June last year. At the same time, Contra Costa had nearly 50 percent of its listings go stale, a 7 percent rise.

Cities such as San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose had bumps in stale listings, too.

San Francisco had the most stale homes, with 62.5 percent of listings on the market for at least 30 days, up 2.1 percent from June last year. Though Oakland had 50.8 percent stale properties, its share increased by 6.9 percent from last year.

San Mateo and Santa Clara counties saw negligible change. Prospective buyers in prosperous Silicon Valley can often pay cash, avoiding mortgage payments and interest rates.

The market in Redwood City “is still very hot,” Mimi Quach, a real estate agent based in San Jose, told the newspaper, with most houses selling in less than two weeks.

Alex Khodadad, a real estate agent based in Contra Costa County and the East Bay, said the longer “days on market” have become the new norm. As long as a house is priced correctly, he added, it can sell within 30 to 45 days.

“Since the pandemic, markets have never been the same again,” Khodadad told the newspaper. While sellers were anxious about slower turnarounds and buyers were hesitant to buy at high interest rates, “now they are getting used to it.”

— Dana Bartholomew