3 Comments

If the vast majority of homes are sold from licensed Realtors, does that organization have any better data? If they logged the price of accepted offers, it could show a much faster view of market changes, even if incomplete (sales that didn't close, private parties, etc).

Expand full comment
author

When a home sells, the transaction price shows up on Zillow within a few days if not hours. So I'm pretty sure Zillow has the raw transaction data in close to realtime. I think the issue is that you have to worry about compositional issues. For example, if for some reason people start selling more low-end homes and fewer high-end homes, that will skew the median sale price. It takes some statistical finesse to account for these kinds of biases and produce an index that reflects the average of all homes.

With that said, it does seem like Zillow should be able to automate the process and publish data more often and more promptly. They published September data on October 19, so an almost 3-week lag.

Expand full comment

I live in California (in San Jose, where the prices dropped 10.x %) and I think it is a lot more nuanced. In my neighborhood, recent transactions aren't showing a decline insomuch as it just taking time to sell. The days on the market is going up to something like 20 (in the froth of the Covid era, often houses were on the market less than 5 days. Listed on Wednesday, accept offers through Saturday, and select a buyer on Sunday. Madness).

There are still a lot of stock rich tech workers who praise the south San Jose area as "affordable" and "commutable" if you work on the Peninsula, or do a day or two in SF.

I do expect that the recent earnings reports from Google, Meta and the coming glut of terminated Twitter employees to reduce the demand here, and a cooling of both prices and activity. But there is still a lot of adjustment that needs to happen.

Expand full comment