Home prices in Fresno, Valley push to new all-time records. See what buyers are paying
The median price of a single-family home continues to increase in Fresno, as well as across the Valley and California, reaching new all-time records in much of the central San Joaquin Valley.
The latest data shows there are few indications of any sort of cooldown in the market.
May 2021 home sales in the 12-county Central Valley region from north of Sacramento south to Kern County were up 44% from a year earlier, and the median selling price – the midpoint at which half of homes sold for more and half for less – reached $445,000 for the first time ever, according to data from the California Association of Realtors.
In Fresno County, the median price of a single-family home in May was $361,500. That’s an increase of more than 22% from the median of less than $300,000 a year in May 2020.
Prices also reached new high-water marks in every neighboring Valley county except Madera. There, the median price slipped from April’s record of $378,000 to $360,000 in May – still the third-highest month ever in Madera County.
The relentless upward march in home prices comes as more Californians express worry about the rising cost of housing. Ninety percent of Californians are concerned about housing prices, according to a March report by the Public Policy Institute of California. In February 2020, in a previous PPIC survey, only 63% of the state’s residents said housing affordability was a big problem.
That, however, was before the coronavirus pandemic. Over the past 15 months, the median price of a home statewide has climbed by more than 41%, almost 31% in the Central Valley, and almost 25% in Fresno County. COVID-19 shut down many office workplaces, prompting employers to let their staff work remotely from home. people with stable incomes were largely unaffected by the recession triggered by the pandemic.
Realtors in the Fresno area said earlier this year that the extended confinement of residents to their homes drove more people to want to upgrade their living situation. “The pandemic and shelter-in-place orders made people appreciate their home more,” said Don Scordino, past president of the Fresno Association of Realtors, a broker associate with Realty Concepts and host of a weekly radio show on the Fresno real estate market. “It’s not only where they go to sleep at night. It became where they go to work, where they go to school, it became their playground.”
“We saw a lot of people this past year sell their smaller home and buy their larger ‘forever home’ and know they’re going to stay there.” he added.
While demand among buyers has increased substantially, the supply of homes has not been able to keep up. Real-estate pros report that many homes are selling quickly, and often for more than than the asking price as sellers receive multiple offers for their property.
A year ago, for example, the median time that a house was on the market on market before it sold was 13 days. The time on the market is now less than half that, at six days. And the average selling price is now typically 103.5% of the seller’s asking price.
But instead of continuing to come down, as it did for much of the past year, that six-day figure has been unchanged for the past three months.
Is that – along with real estate experts in the Sacramento area reporting fewer homes attracting multiple offers – a possible sign of stabilization of the market, if not a slowdown?
“My take is that the data is starting to show some limits to what buyers are willing and able to pay,” economist Jeffrey Michael of the University of the Pacific told The Sacramento Bee earlier this month.
The Sacramento Bee contributed to this report.
This story was originally published June 29, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
