October Marin Update: Feds Keep Goblins Out and Interest Rates Low, Prices Unlikely to Fall With the Leaves as Inventory Remains Tight

October is here and the weather has just turned to fall in the last few days. Cooler mornings and evenings become the norm and a few leaves scatter on the ground, but it’s still one of our nicest months with a lot happening in the county. The Mill Valley Film Festival kicks off in the first half of the month, with pumpkin patch jumpys in at least a dozen locations for the kids to burn off that pent up energy.

Speaking of energy, the housing market ramped right back up after Labor Day, pretty much as we were expecting. Multiple offers were out there in force, but, as always, usually just on the well-priced homes in the lower price ranges of each town and in the good locations. These are the near-bullet proof properties here: they were the last to fall in value during the mortgage meltdown and the first to recover strongly in early 2011. Given that Marin is only now back to where prices were in 2006, they are still considered to be “cheap” by many standards, even though those standards are some of the most “uncheap” in the country. Why is that?

Well, I can’t speak for what other counties don’t have, but I can tell you what Marin does have. It’s what traditionally has kept us at the forefront of housing values over the last 65 years, which is when they started keeping track of the data. That is: quality of life. If you want terrific weather with four real seasons of the year, no smog, no real crime and some of the best schools in the state (both public and private), it’s going to cost you. Throw in with that our no-growth mandate (often called “low growth”) and the lowest attrition rate in the state, with very few people moving out of the county and you have a recipe for a tight housing market. We don’t have Manhattan or Malibu home prices here, but we do have Marin prices and a quality of life and outdoors that neither of those areas can boast about.

Think about it. Where else are you going to find roughly 75% protected open space in a vast county of 520 square miles and only 258,000 people, this close to three major employment centers (SF, Oakland, Silicon Valley), this close to open beaches, a bay, hiking, biking, walking and Lake Tahoe? No place I know of and you can see why the demand to live here continues and pushes our population to increase each year by approx 1% annually, yet we aren’t adding any housing units to speak of, certainly not 2,580 anyway.

Will prices continue up? Probably. They’ve only dropped once in the last 60 years, as they did in the rest of the country, and that was due to factors way outside the dynamics of living in Marin: it was a global and national mortgage meltdown, nothing changed throughout the county. And during that five year slide down, you know what happened to our housing inventory? It also dropped. People stayed, they didn’t leave town. They chose quality of life for themselves and their families over the vacation house, the boat, or the extra car. They somehow figured this was a great place to live and did what they could to stay here. What do you think? Let me know.

Meantime, enjoy October wherever you are. Let me know of any questions. I’m here to help.

TS

Filed under: Marin Real Estate Blog by AgentImage