California Dominates Top-Performing Housing Markets List

San Francisco, San Jose, and Sacramento were among the nation’s top-performing housing markets in January, according to an analysis by realtor.com®.

The same analysis by realtor.com® revealed that homes were selling 4 percent faster nationwide than they did a year earlier, but housing supply hit new lows. Prices, meanwhile, remained at record highs. While nearly 360,000 new listings entered the market in January, inventory was down by 11 percent from a year ago, reports realtor.com®.

“We saw evidence of a stronger-than-normal off-season starting last September and October due to pent-up demand and surging interest from first-time buyers,” says Chief Economist Jonathan Smoke of realtor.com®. “The downside to this strong off-season is that we have started 2017 with a new low volume of available homes for sale and a new high for prices.”

Low inventory has been a challenging factor in parts of Northern California, particularly the San Francisco Bay Area. In fact, even though realtor.com® highlighted several markets in the region as top-performing in January, the California Association of REALTORS® cited the scarce housing supply as a key reason for the decline in the Bay Area’s pending home sales in December.

While pending home sales were on the rise throughout most of California in December, pending home sales in the San Francisco Bay Area as a whole fell 14.2 percent compared to December 2015 and 32.5 percent from November 2015.

San Mateo County posted the steepest decline in December at 35.3 percent, followed by San Francisco County at 23.3 percent. Meanwhile, Santa Clara County experienced an 18.6 percent decline in pending home sales.

Projections of mortgage rate increases in upcoming months are creating a sense of urgency among buyers, according to housing experts, which means that buyers will be scrambling to see new listings.

Despite the fact that fewer homes were available for sale, realtor.com® identified the following 20 top-performing markets in January, based on where buyers were checking out the most listings and homes were selling briskly:

• San Francisco, Calif.
• San Jose, Calif.
• Vallejo, Calif.
• Dallas, Texas
• San Diego, Calif.
• Sacramento, Calif.
• Yuba City, Calif.
• Denver, Colo.
• Stockton, Calif.
• Fresno, Calif.
• Oxnard, Calif.
• Columbus, Ohio
• Colorado Springs, Colo.
• Nashville, Tenn.
• Detroit, Mich.
• Modesto, Calif.
• Los Angeles, Calif.
• Tampa, Fla.
• Santa Rosa, Calif.
• Fort Wayne, Ind.