The San Francisco Market Takes a Nap

You know the feeling. You’ve gorged on turkey, cranberries, sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, green beans, and every other culinary delight on your Thanksgiving table. Filled with tryptophan and generally exhausted by your eating exertions, you take your post-feast nap, hoping to wake up recharged and ready to take on the pumpkin and pecan pies.

Even though Thanksgiving isn’t until Thursday, the San Francisco real estate market has already decided it’s time to take its annual holiday nap.

In the olden days (2010), the thickness of the printed broker’s tour was a good guide to inventory. The higher the inventory, the thicker the broker’s tour report. Environmentally friendly? Not really. Fortunately, I have the privilege to be testing out a product currently in a closed beta that brings the broker’s tour report to my phone. It’s pretty slick, and definitely a much more modern way of touring homes on Tuesday. I’m going to save you my rant about the MLS and third party vendors, but as much as I love this product I’m equally frustrated by the fact that it isn’t just a standard offering from our MLS vendor…

Anyway, awesome-but-unreleased product that I probably shouldn’t be blogging about (don’t tell) has a very handy stats page that manages to convey the same information I used to get about the market from printing the tour, but it saves trees!

San Francisco Inventory

As you can see from the screenshot of inventory, the holiday slump has begun. Buyers and sellers often travel over the holidays, and if you are a seller keeping your home in showing condition is particularly challenging if you are cooking a meal for 20 or hosting the in-laws for a few days. Tomorrow there are only 112 new properties on the market, down significantly from the beginning of the month, and even more substantially from the beginning of September, when we traditionally see a spike in new inventory to take advantage of our summer weather between Labor Day and Thanksgiving.

So what does it mean for you? If you are a seller, the good news is you have less new inventory to compete against. If you are a buyer, there may or may not be deals to be had. I’ve seen buyer interest remain strong this fall (a property I wrote an offer for received over 15 offers just last week), but if you stick with it through the holidays you just might catch your competition napping and snag yourself an excellent San Francisco home.