Bay Area home sales declined in December from a year earlier, but the median price of a home rose on a year-over-year basis for the 57th consecutive month.
Sales dipped 9.1 percent across the nine counties, according to a report Tuesday from CoreLogic, the real estate information service.
But with buyers competing for a limited supply of homes, the median price for Bay Area home sales increased 4 percent to $676,000.
“Last month, the San Francisco Bay Area’s housing market posted its largest year-over-year sales decline since last July, but there’s a caveat,” said Andrew LePage, research analyst with CoreLogic.
“The number of deals recorded in December 2015 was artificially high — the result of then-new federal mortgage rules that caused delays for many transactions that normally would have closed the prior month,” he said. “December 2015 also had one more business day for recording deals compared with December 2016.”
LePage also weighed in on the possible effect of rising mortgage rates: “It’s possible that in the Bay Area, where homebuyers face some of the highest prices and mortgage payments in the country, rising mortgage rates in November 2016 had a net negative impact on the number of home sales recorded in December 2016.”
Here are other key numbers from the report, which measures transactions for all homes — old and new, single-family, condominiums and townhouses.
Sales fell 7.9 percent year-over-year in Contra Costa County, while the median price rose there by 5.1 percent to $505,000.
In Alameda County, sales dipped 7.5 percent, while the median price increased 5.4 percent to $685,000.
In Santa Clara County, sales dropped 8 percent and the median price rose 2.1 percent to $805,000.
In San Mateo County, sales were off 11.5 percent, while the median price climbed 10 percent to $1,008,000.
CoreLogic said figures were not yet available for December transactions in San Francisco. The Bay Area-wide numbers in the report are an estimate; San Francisco sales typically account for seven or eight percent of all sales in the nine-county region.
The single family home market followed the same general trends — sales down, prices up.
Bay Area-wide, sales fell 7.7 percent year-over-year, while the median price rose 3.0 percent to $680,000.
In Contra Costa County, sales dropped 5.4 percent and the median price climbed 8.4 percent to $498,500. In Alameda county, sales dipped 9.1 percent and the median rose 3.2 percent to $700,000.
Finally, here are the single family numbers for Silicon Valley:
Santa Clara County sales were off 8.9 percent year-over-year and the median price inched up 1.2 percent to $865,000. In San Mateo County, sales dropped 7.7 percent and the median rose 5.0 percent to $1,155,000.
