With the holiday season approaching it’s a good time to take a look at what’s happening with the housing market in Marin County.
It was a pretty slow summer, but as you’ll see in the chart below there was a nice uptick in homes entering escrow in October, the most new pendings since the little run of activity that peaked in April. Inventory is ticking down and we would expect it to drop off dramatically in November and bottom out in December as it typically does as homes sell without being replaced by new inventory and sellers pull their properties off the market for the Holidays.
We saw a bit of a glut of inventory overall through the summer, but as you can see from this chart of months supply based on pending sales, supply and demand are closing. And this fits with what we’re seeing, as there have been few homes coming on the market the last several weeks, while buyers are still buying. Inventory could get pretty slim over the winter, which could be a good argument for sellers to buck the conventional wisdom that says you should wait for spring to bring your home on. A desirable, well-priced home can attract a lot of attention in a period with very little competition.
And here’s a look at price in dollars per square foot. I’ve limited it to homes under $3 million, since higher end luxury properties tend to skew the numbers and have been more volatile.
As you can see, Marin residential properties (under $3 million) on average have been bouncing along between about $400 and $440 per square foot for a while now. In fact if we look at a five year graph you can see the big drop in 2008, but then relative stability over the last two years.
