Will It Be a November to Remember For Marin Real Estate?

Unexpected rain fell on the county at the beginning of this month, but it wasn’t enough to dampen the spirits of Giants fans who turned out in droves for the downtown pennant celebration. The paper said the numbers topped 200,000, which is a lot of people for anything, let alone crowded into and around city streets. Makes you thankful we can all come home to the peace and quiet of Marin; not that the home sale market has been peaceful or quiet lately.

Home buyers also continued to show up in droves last month. Despite our usual low inventory, properties traded at the rate of just over 8 homes (or condos) per day. The average price was just under $1.2 mil with the median at roughly $900,000. Both these numbers were below our norm for the year, likely due to an inordinate number of closings in the lower end of the price range in all towns. The average Days On Market (DOM) for a sale to ratify and close continued in the 60 day range.

Going forward, buyers have only 475 total homes, condos, farms or ranches to choose from (not that there are ever many of the latter). We don’t look for that supply to change dramatically as November is more of a transitional month for new listings. Many people either pull their homes off the market or decline to put them on as the holidays are widely celebrated in our bedroom communities. Winter also tends to shed less favorable light (literally) on many properties as filtered sun through trees or forests often appears less-appealing to many buyers, most of whom prefer natural light over man made. Given that our county is 75% hillside, a good number of those properties will be north-facing, garnering even fewer rays from Mister Sun than their southern oriented neighbors.

Still, there’s “a rear for every seat” as I heard a sage old investor say years ago. (Picture his real phrase to be one that relates to a donkey, though). No matter how dark, unusual or even outright repulsive a home may seem to you, chances are somebody may like it. I recall one of my first sales back in the 80’s, when I had a listing that, literally, hung right over the freeway. Every agent and prospective buyer that came through, was turned off by the roar of all six (now eight) lanes of highway 101 right out the back door. But towards the end of my second Open House, an Emergency Room surgeon from SF walked through the front doorway, past the living room and out onto the deck at the traffic whizzing by below. “Great, I can see the freeway, I’ll take it”, or roughly something like that. As far as I know, he still lives there today as I’ve yet to see the home come back on the market. And there you have it.

Buyers, if you’re looking for that hard-to-find seat, make sure your agent is in one of the two top network groups, mostly compromised of the busiest 100 agents in the county. We often have extensive off-market inventory: properties a seller is willing to show on an appointment basis, that isn’t necessarily on MLS. These are sometimes “coming to the market after January 1st” or recently withdrawn for the holidays, but nearly all of them can be seen with some notice. With interest rates still hovering near record low levels, it’s a great time to buy a home in Marin without competing with the 100+ other buyers out there on any given Sunday.

So enjoy November, wherever you are. Let me know how I can help with any questions. Text 415.377.5222 or email ted@allmarin.com, but I also do take the archaic method of the phone call and will be happy to assist however I can.

Ted

Filed under: Marin Real Estate Blog by Ted Strodder