This week in East Bay home sales: 2020 vs. 2021 pt. 2

The spring housing market just lost 200,000 listings across the U.S. There were nearly half as many homes for sale at the end of February, compared with the same period last year.

Of course, that's the national average. The East Bay numbers paint a slightly different picture, but it's useful to have context.

Last week, we shared some numbers from the week before the shutdown went into effect and compared that with the same time period in 2021. To recap, we reported a 23% increase in the number of total sales, a 38% decrease in the number of days on market, and a 31% increase in average sales price from January 1 to the first week of March in 2020 vs. 2021. 

This week, we wanted to see how the shelter-in-place mandate affected the market and compare it to the same week in 2021. Here's a quick breakdown:

New listings this week

• 2020: 814
• 2021: 883

New pending listings this week

• 2020: 615
• 2021: 636

Listings sold this week

• 2020: 515
• 2021: 392

Listings canceled this week:

• 2020: 61
• 2021: 22

?Listings expired this week:

• 2020: 61
• 2021: 0

These numbers are telling us that our supply today is nearly as short as it was during the most restrictive time of lockdown last year. We only have 10% more in supply than we did when we couldn’t even show vacant homes.

You've heard it here before: Demand is high and supply is super low, and that’s why we are seeing the madness of listings receiving multiple offers way higher than comparative properties recently sold for. (We call these comps.) At this point, the comps don’t even matter a whole lot. It all depends on how much folks are willing to pay over the appraised value—and sometimes that's a lot.

To further illustrate the lack of supply, with 861 new listings hitting the market and 636 listings pending in the same week this year, that means we only have a little over a week's worth of supply.

Meanwhile, the low numbers of expired and canceled listings in 2021 tell us that everything that hits the market is selling right now. What a wonderful time to be a seller!

It's definitely harder to be a buyer in this market, but the low interest rates more than make it worth the potential pain of missing the mark with an offer or three. And we have a lot of recent (and pending!) success stories to prove it. But it's more important than ever to be aligned with a team who has good relationships with top agents in the area and who has access to off-market properties. (Ahem, we know a great one.)