Sacramento’s real estate market is soft, but not dead. Here’s what you need to know
The weekend after Super Bowl is the unofficial opening of Sacramento’s peak real estate season, when sellers put out the yard signs and potential buyers start making the rounds.
More homes typically are sold – and at higher prices – from March to July than another time of the year.
But it looks like this may be a quiet spring. The number of houses on the market in the Sacramento region has been low by historic standards for months.
That would normally make this spring another seller’s market, but new data suggests that sellers don’t have much of an upper hand at the moment.
More than half of the houses sold right now are getting only one or two offers, Sacramento real estate appraiser and analyst Ryan Lundquist said, far from the wild days of recent years when any reasonably priced home would have multiple suitors.
Even though the number of houses on the market is low, buyers in the last year have become “picky and patient,” he said. “The market feels like a blank canvas at this time of year.”
New data this week from Zillow, the national real estate analyst, confirms that. Zillow found that only 30 percent of homes sold in Sacramento in 2019 went for more than the asking price. The average sale price of those homes was a modest $6,000 over the initial price.
Notably, though, Sacramento ranks sixth nationally in that Zillow analysis among the top 36 metropolitan areas. (See the chart below this story.) That means the Sacramento housing market is still relatively competitive amid sluggishness in real estate markets nationally.
As of the end of 2019, houses in Sacramento were selling for about 97 to 98 percent of the asking price. That means the region is still populated with some sellers who are overly optimistic about the value of their houses, and have had to drop their prices to make a sale.
The lack of houses on the market could make this a frustrating spring for buyers.
Notably, real estate watchers say, homes priced at the region’s low end, which includes houses at $300,000, have been seeing more buyer interests and higher-percentage mark ups when multiple buyers make bids. Higher-cost homes are more likely to have just one or two offers.
Realtor Luis Espinoza of Lyon Real Estate says successful buyers will have done their homework up front, including meeting with a lender, to be ready when the moment arrives. “If not, you are really just window shopping,” he said.
In Folsom, which has grown into one of the higher-priced cities in the region, Steve Heard with eXp Realty Services said he is still seeing people from out of the area attracted to the foothills area, both to new homes south of Highway 50 and resale homes in the older parts of the town.
He recently got three offers on a $849,000 home in the El Dorado Hills, and currently has clients from Soquel, Chicago, Hawaii and midtown Sacramento shopping for Folsom homes.
This story was originally published February 7, 2020 at 9:27 AM.