As Sacramento appraiser and blogger Ryan Lindquist puts it, the market feels like Thanksgiving leftovers. He goes on to say:

We’ve had a pretty normal fall dynamic in many ways, and it’s been very different from the sharp change last year. Prices have softened, it’s taking longer to sell, and we’re seeing less sales, which is all typical. But one thing that isn’t normal is active listings have increased over the past couple of months. At this time of year, we almost always see actives shrink, but not this year. What’s the cause? There have been fewer pending contracts lately, and that’s made the pile of active listings grow larger since properties are staying on the market (not caused by sellers rushing to list more). We’re only talking about a few hundred extra listings in the region, so let’s not sensationalize this, but obviously more listings can affect the real estate temperature. Oh, and let me clarify. We are nowhere close to a normal number of sales. It’s still been such a strange market with low volume and still low supply. By the way, here’s a thread I wrote about actives on Twitter in case there is interest.

We’ve cherry picked some of the graphics from his post that are specific to Sacramento county specifically, but if you want to see data for multiple surrounding counties — plus some analysis on the current state of credit debt — be sure to visit his site. And be sure to follow him on social (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn) for witty, insightful posts.

In short, prices are overall up, while total number of sales and days on market (DOM) are significantly down, reflecting the tightness of the market. Currently we’re down nearly 10% in number of sales for Sacramento County, and this pressure has driven prices up to their highest for this time of year to date. If rates begin to come down, as they are predicted to do, we may see more listings open up in 2024, which could alleviate that pressure. But looking back, if you had the means to buy in the latter half of 2022, when rates first began their climb, you may have been able to snag some relative bargains. Ah well, live and learn.