San Carlos Home Prices Reach New Heights

Tough Sledding for Home Buyers.

If you're in the market to purchase a home in San Carlos, then you already know that the past 3 months have been absolutely brutal on home buyers.

Rock-bottom interest rates, a rapidly strengthening local economy and a booming stock market have combined to unleash a tidal wave of well-heeled buyers onto San Carlos, as well as other desirable communities up and down the Peninsula.  

When you mix in the dearth of inventory to feed this insatiable demand, what happens?  Prices go up.  Way up.  And that's exactly what's happening with the local real estate market in the City of Good Living.  

I recently wrote a post on the White Oaks Blog that dives more deeply into the Q1-2013 housing numbers for San Carlos, but I'll summarize the key numbers below that will simply confirm what you probably already knew was happening.

Q1-2013:  A New High.

For the first 3 months of 2013, prices simply took off in San Carlos.  I pulled the data on closed sales from the Multiple Listing Service (MLS) and created the custom chart that is attached.    

The average price of all homes sold in San Carlos in the first quarter hit $1,237,228.  This figure not only represents a huge 15% jump over for the entire year in 2012, but it's also the highest average sales price for ANY quarter over the past 10 years (which is as far back as the MLS data goes.)   It wouldn't be a stretch to assume that this figure is an all-time high.

Inventory Plummets:

One of the primary driving factors behind the steep increase in price is the lack of inventory of home for sale.  Econ 101 tells you when demand oustrips supply, prices go up.   The chart below shows both the number of listings and the number of homes sold in the first quarter of each of the last.  

The 73 homes that were listed in San Carlos in the first 3 months is a 15% drop from the same period last year, and is the lowest number of new listings for a first quarter in San Carlos in the past 10 years!   

So if it feels like there are less homes to choose from in San Carlos, now you know why.

What it Means for Buyers and Sellers.

For home sellers, this is obviously great news.  Homes that are priced well and in good locations are selling in about a week with mutliple offers.   And as we discussed, the prices that they're fetching are now at all-time highs.  

The conditions have caused some sellers who were going to sell a few years down the road to accelerate the process to take advantage of these incredible conditions.

For home buyers, the news isn't so great.  There's simply less to choose from, and what is available just got a whole lot more expensive.  That means settling for less, or digging deeper to get what you want.  And for some, it means an exit from the market altogether.