Bay Area Housing Market in this election year.

2024 brings us another wild and wacky election year. Let’s chat real quick about how this effects the real estate market in the San Francisco Bay Area.

It’s possible that high housing prices might pose problems for Biden in this election year, but people feel all different ways about that. 

For San Francisco these highly divisive election years make stuff pretty weird, people aren’t feeling the love, the vibe gets funky in a bad way. But outside of the concern some residents feel around the negative social effects, there are uncertainties about what to expect from the housing market.

Just like we didn’t see the huge leap in home values coming during the pandemic, we also didn’t expect homes to appreciate during the 2016 election. That election was such a hot mess, the general prediction was that first round of Trump vs Hilary might cause enough upheaval to have a negative impact. That wasn’t how it happened though. Riding the big high, just shortly after the huge spike of the Bay Area tech boom, the election year in 2016 carried on a continuous value increase that had steadily climbed up until 2022, when things started to cool off during the giant scary interest rate times. The election didn’t Accelerate the housing market spike, and it didn’t cause any plateau, it just kept on going up as it had been. 

So what’s gonna happen this year gosh darn it?! 

Some good news- the Federal Reserve has paused rate hikes for a hot minute. There should in fact be rate cuts this year, and 2025 and also 2026. That’s not really related to the election at all, it’s just happy housing market news. 

In fact, when we look at the spikes, and the lows in the San Francisco Bay Area real estate market, the election 4 years ago and the one before that weren’t particularly impactful themselves. Yes, the market values went up in 2016, but they were going up already and it was likely the continued tech industry boom that kept driving that bad boy. 

Look, whichever way things go politically will have a big impact on housing, whether people who can’t afford it now get more options, whether people who live here now choose to stay here, a lot of things. And while it’s always scary to speculate how unhinged things could get, we can at least worry less about what might happen because of the election year it’s self. The crazy parts come after, but this year, the 2024 we’ve fought through hell to get to, this year could be pretty cool.