San Luis Obispo Real Estate Market Update

Welcome to our May, 2024 market update for San Luis Obispo County.

We're going to talk about three things, of course our market statistics. Number two, we're going to talk about things that are in the news, one about pricing and two, about a little letter that the California Association Realtors put in our local newspaper about this big settlement.

So market, everything's interesting when you talk about the market here in San Luis Obispo County. Big news this month, inventory is up about a hundred properties that represents about 40% of an increase. Our pending's are down a little bit from this time a year ago, and close sales up about 10 or 12% percent. Here is the very exciting news. We've had 67% more homes came on the market this month than a year ago. So that's a big bump in the marketplace. That's virtually over 140 houses. That's a lot. We've not seen triple digits in many, many years. So what does all this mean? Well, it means the market is stable. The fact that we have more homes coming on the market is good news because that means more sellers feel confident to sell. It means there's more options for buyers and a lot of sellers going to have to buy.

It tells me we have a more balanced, healthier market with this increase of vastly and desperately needed homes. Market's still very strong and very predictable. Let's talk about prices. Recently in the news, we had three new cities in San Luis Obispo County joined, for lack of a better term, the Million Dollar Club. We have Cayucos, Avila Beach, Pismo Beach all had an average price over a million dollars. We just added cities of San Luis Obispo, Arroyo Grande, and Cambria over a million dollars. So that's a pretty impressive price range in terms of what's happening in the marketplace. So our prices up or down, that's very specific to location in general. I would say on average, they're up a few points from say, 3, 6, 9, 12 months ago. Again, very, very specific. That's why people like to call us because it varies from neighborhood to community to type of home. But in general, six houses or six cities in this community have average home prices over a million dollars.

Lastly, the California Association of Realtors put a full page ad to our local paper just recently regarding the National Association Realtors settlement. People keep asking me, what does it mean? What's it going to mean for us? We do know a couple of things. One, nothing has been decided yet, in fact, a judge has to rule on it. When this first settlement was announced, I guess it's been a month or so ago, there was going to be a judge ruling on mid-July. Well, it appears that's been pushed back to mid-November because there's a lot of things to work out. A lot of things get finalized. So what does that mean? It means we know less today than we did a month ago.

However, it seems like we're heading towards a little bit more change in the transaction in terms of buyers signing by our broker agreements, which have been available for decades and are used in other states. So nothing new. It also seems that commissions probably won't be posted on what's being offered out through the MLS.

So a lot of real estate jargon. But here's what I'm going to take from this. We've been involved since I've been in real estate with selling homes before there was an internet where there's sheets of paper and a book once every two weeks that came out on what's for sale. We've been involved with the Y2K, we've been involved with the 2008 real estate recession, that global recession, which was crazy. We've been through Covid, which changed the game in a lot of ways. We've seen it all. Yet we still see very much the same process of a buyer wanting to buy a home, a seller wanting to sell, and most cases, you're going to need some good professional advice.

At the end of the day, we're here to answer any questions you have. Again, thank you, thank you, thank you for all your great support.

We'll look forward to talking to you next month.