Mountain View home listings continue their downward trend
By Hadar Guibara
It’s unlikely that you’ll wake up 12 years from now and discover that there are no homes for sale in Mountain View — that’s assuming the current three-year trend in new listings numbers doesn’t continue.
From January to August 2011, 194 new home listings entered the Mountain View real estate market. In that same period three years later, in 2014, that number had dropped to 156. If this downward trend were maintained in just the first eight months of upcoming years — and if Septembers through Decembers remained basically steady — by the time 2027 rolled around, there would be no more new listings.
We don’t expect that to happen, because real estate is a cyclical market, with semi-predictable ups and downs. Yet this current down period in single-family home availability has buyers biting their fingernails and playing a chancy version of Russian roulette with their offers.
Buyers paying 10 percent above listing price
It’s no longer enough to approach a homeowner with an offer right at or a little above what he or she is asking for the home. That tactic worked just a few short years ago, when many homes throughout Silicon Valley actually sold for less than the asking price. In 2011 in Mountain View, in January, March and November, buyers paid 96.7 percent, 97.0 percent and 99.8 percent, respectively, of the homes’ list price.
Between January and August 2014, buyers paid 110 percent of the asking price on homes here. Low inventories and fierce bidding wars have caused buyers in most Silicon Valley cities to come into deals with their strongest possible offers. Two examples: During the first eight months of 2014, buyers in Menlo Park paid 106 percent while buyers in Palo Alto laid down 113 percent of the initial asking price of the homes they purchased.
Another trend worth watching is the length of time it’s taking for deals on the homes in our tiny inventory pool to be finalized. For the last several years, the average days on the market for Mountain View homes has been dropping, but numbers for September 2013 through August 2014 paint a startling picture.
During the first six months of that period (September-February), homes were sold, on average, in 33.2 days. Over the next six months, that average dropped to an even 14 days. While it’s true that fall and winter aren’t the hottest selling seasons, the difference in these numbers is still remarkable.
So while we’ll probably never see zero homes for sale in Mountain View, it will be interesting to watch the inventory and other trends as we move into the slower fall and winter months.
Hadar Guibara is a Realtor with Sereno Group of Palo Alto. She can be reached at hadar@serenogroup.com.
