Market Analysis

Three numbers do most of the work. What sold, at what price against the asking price, and how long it sat. A list of active listings tells you what other sellers hope for; only closed sales tell you what buyers agreed to.

The reason this matters more than it sounds is that pricing is a decision you effectively make once. The market forms an opinion about a listing in its first fortnight, and after that the conversation is no longer about the home, it is about why it has not sold.

In the National Association of Realtors 2025 Home Buyers and Sellers Generational Trends report, the median purchase price was 100 percent of the asking price. The distribution underneath is the interesting part.

Read that as a scoreboard for the asking price rather than for the home. A listing priced where the evidence sits lands in the top three rows. One priced above it lands in the bottom three, later, after a reduction.

The same National Association of Realtors report puts the median recently sold home at three weeks on the market. Ten percent went in under a week and a further 39 percent within one to two weeks, so 49 percent of homes were spoken for inside a fortnight.

That distribution is the whole argument for getting the number right at the start. The most motivated, best-financed buyers — the ones who have been watching the market and know a fair price when it appears — are looking at your listing in week one. A price that makes them scroll past does not get a second chance at them.

The National Association of Realtors figures show 64 percent of sellers never reduced the asking price at all. Of the rest, 21 percent reduced once, 9 percent twice, 4 percent three times and 2 percent four or more.

A reduction is not simply a lower number. It is a public signal, on a listing whose days-on-market figure every buyer's agent can see, and it invites the offer to come in under the new price rather than at it. Twenty-four percent of sellers also ended up offering incentives to attract buyers. Our view: almost every reduction cycle we see started as an optimistic opening price that nobody wanted to argue with.

Listing agents are responsible for the accuracy of what goes into that record under it has to be kept for at least three years. That is what makes a comparison possible at all: a sale from four months ago is still there, with its asking price, its closing price and how long it took.

What is not in it matters too. Off-market and private sales, transfers between family members, and homes sold before they were ever listed do not carry a reliable market price, and an analysis that quietly includes them is worse than one that leaves them out.

Automated valuations work from the public record and from sales nearby. They are reasonable at a neighbourhood average and unreliable on a single address, because a renovated home and a tired one with the same square footage look identical in the data. So do a home backing the greenbelt and one backing the arterial road.

The assessed value on your tax bill is a different number again and is not an estimate of what the home is worth. Under Proposition 13 the assessed value is generally the value at purchase, growing by a capped amount each year, which is why a home held for twenty years is assessed far below what it would sell for. The California State Board of Equalization publishes how that base year value works and when it is reassessed. Our own use for the automated numbers, honestly stated: they are a useful sanity check on the order of magnitude and nothing more. We look at them; we do not price from them.

This is judgment rather than a published rule, so here is ours. Distance matters less than boundary: a home half a mile away but in a different village, a different association, or a different school attendance area is frequently a worse comparable than one further away inside the same tract.

Recency matters more than people expect in a market that moves on interest rates. A sale from nine months ago closed against a different cost of borrowing and should be adjusted or dropped, not used flat. Similar means the things a buyer pays for: single storey against two, the view, the lot position, garage spaces, and whether the kitchen and bathrooms have been done. Square footage alone is the weakest of these and the one most often relied on. And in this county there is a fourth factor that is easy to miss: association dues and any Mello-Roos special assessment. Two homes at the same price with a four hundred dollar monthly difference in carrying cost are not competing at the same price.

The National Association of Realtors reports that buyers typically searched for ten weeks and looked at a median of seven homes. That is the clock the market runs on. The set of buyers who will see your listing in spring is largely not the set who were looking at Christmas, and they are working against different rates.

Which is why we would rather send you a current one than have you rely on a number from last year. It costs us nothing to run it again.

The National Association of Realtors reports a median of ten years in the home before selling. Ten years of assumption is a long time, and the two decisions it usually distorts are whether to remodel and whether a move-up is affordable at all.

The practical case for knowing where you stand early: you find out which improvements the market will actually pay for before you spend on them, and you find out whether the equity supports the next purchase before you fall in love with it. Neither of those is a selling decision.

Choose the market at the top of this page and give us an email address, and we put together the current picture for it: what has sold recently, how those prices compared to what was asked, how long they took, and what is on the market now.

On your details, plainly: we use them to send you the analysis and to follow up once about it. You are not added to a daily alert, and one reply telling us to stop is enough. If you want the analysis narrowed to your own address rather than the wider market, say so when you reply to it — that is a different piece of work and it needs the address.