Yahoo Finance Top 10 Fastest-Selling Housing Markets This Spring
The real estate market’s spring selling season is off to a strong start in parts of California and in Seattle and Denver. The rest of the country, however, has seen a slowdown.
U.S. sales of new single-family houses in March 2014 were at a seasonally-adjusted annual rate of 384,000, down 14.5 percent from February and 13.3 percent from March 2013, according to estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Department of Housing and Urban Development released Wednesday.
Yet in some parts of California, especially Northern California where the tech industry is clustered, as well as in Denver and in Seattle, homes have been selling at a faster rate than in the rest of the country. These markets have the lowest share of homes still on the market after being listed for at least two months, according to a Trulia report also released Wednesday.
Trulia calculated the share of homes for sale on its website on Feb. 14 that are still on the market as of April 14. Faster-moving markets have a lower percentage of homes still on the market after two months, while slower-moving markets have a higher percentage.
Related: When Selling Your Home on Your Own Makes Sense
Here are America’s fastest-moving housing markets and the share of homes still for sale after being listed for at least two months as of mid-April:
1- Oakland, CA: 29 percent
2- San Jose, CA: 31 percent
3- San Francisco, CA: 32 percent
4- Denver, CO: 38 percent
5- San Diego, CA: 41 percent
6- Seattle, WA: 43 percent
7- Los Angeles, CA: 44 percent
8- Orange County, CA: 45 percent
9- Sacramento, CA: 45 percent
10- Middlesex County, MA: 46 percent
Faster-moving markets have had bigger price increases and tend to be more expensive to begin with, notes Jed Kolko, Trulia’s chief economist, in the report. Silicon Valley’s technology boom has certainly helped fuel a real estate bubble in the top three fastest-moving markets. “These fast-moving markets are sellers’ markets were homes don’t stay on the market for long,” he says, adding that expensive markets, including many in California, have a perennially tight housing supply because of limited construction.
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