It looks like Fall is here and the change in the weather for people looking  to buy homes hasn’t seemed to change in the way I was worried about last week at this time.  Open houses are good barometers for measuring the desire of potential buyers and our open house yesterday was very busy.  Some were neighbors, the lookieloos comparing this home to theirs.  Some were serious buyers trying to figure out whether this house is the one. Some stop by to see the house because they saw the signs and it’s fun to look at homes on a Sunday.  We really don’t expect to sell that house through an open house, in fact I don’t think anyone expects that because it happens so rarely but we hope to connect with someone who isn’t being represented by another agent and help them find their house.

Tomorrow is our local Broker’s tour and Samcar, our local board of Realtors, decided to make changes with our tour sheet so it is impossible to figure out how many new listings really came out this week for tour.  I used to look at the number of pages for the tour sheet and could get an idea of what was going on with the market that week but that ain’t happening this week because I’m looking at an Excel spreadsheet of 11 pages and 50 lines of listings per page making it a total of 555 properties on tour tomorrow.  Because of the change that was made it is difficult to figure out what’s new and what’s not.  If you see a bunch of loonies driving around in circles tomorrow in San Mateo County, likely you’re seeing Realtors driving in frustration!

What I am seeing in the market as Fall is approaching is a shift in the number of listings.  Since San Mateo County never has a lot of listing this may be the beginning of a change in the market in our county.  But, then again, it may not.   This shortage of listings isn’t a new thing, it’s something that’s gone on for years because we don’t have any more land to build on and most of the county built out years ago.  That’s one of the reasons prices are high around here and always have been higher than surrounding counties.  If you want to live in San Mateo County you swallow hard and plunk down a lot of money.  We offer fantastic weather, a highly educated community, close proximity to Stanford, San Jose State, Santa Clara University, Notre Dame De Namur, San Francisco State, UCSF, USF, and if you must cross the bay, UC and Cal State East Bay (Hayward State) and generally easy commutes to the business centers in the Valley for high-tech and San Francisco or South San Francisco for bio-tech.  We have good schools in most of the communities we serve and that drives the desire to live here as well.  At first glance it appears that the increase in listing is at the lower end of the spectrum with entry level homes and condos.  The homes in the
higher end of the market, the ones just under a million and those above and beyond are still fewer in number. Tomorrow should be an interesting day for tour.