Where Are Bay Area Homes Selling the Fastest?

Conventional wisdom holds that real estate activity slows around the holidays, but the Bay Area’s exceptionally tight inventory conditions may have motivated buyers to pound the pavement harder than usual in the final month of 2017. According to December MLS data, single-family homes in the Bay Area regions in which Pacific Union operates sold in an average of 46 days, nine days faster than they did one year earlier.

But in some communities, homes sold much quicker than that. To find out where buyers are acting the fastest, we dug into December’s average days-on-market data for 60-plus Bay Area communities. Note that only communities with at least five single-family home sales last month have been included in this analysis. Here are the 10 Bay Area housing markets where buyers had to act the fastest to successfully close a deal.

1. Lafayette: Homes in this Contra Costa County city sold in an average of seven days in December, the fastest of any Bay Area city. That’s the speediest pace of sales recorded in Lafayette over the past two years and nearly three weeks faster than one year earlier.
2. Hillsborough: Buyers in Hillsborough took just eight days to close a sale last month, compared with 76 days in December 2016.
3. Los Altos:  Homes in Los Altos left the market in 11 days in December. Over the past two years, the pace of sales in the Santa Clara County city has ranged from nine days to 40 days.
4. Burlingame: Burlingame homebuyers took 13 days to close a sale last month, one day faster than last December. Homes in the city have sold in two weeks or less in six of the past 12 months.
5. Pleasant Hill: Homes in Contra Costa County’s Pleasant Hill left the market in an average of 14 days in December, although they sold in as few as nine days earlier in 2017.
6. El Cerrito: El Cerrito buyers took 17 days to purchase a home last month, nine days faster than in December 2016.
7. San Francisco District 4: In San Francisco‘s District 4, which includes the Diamond Heights, St. Francis Wood, and West Portal neighborhoods, homes left the market in an average of 18 days in December. Homes in the district sold in less than 30 days in every month of 2017.
8. Palo Alto: Homes in perpetually popular Palo Alto sold in an average of 19 days in December. The pace of sales exceeded 30 days in only three months out of the past two years,.
9. San Mateo: San Mateo homebuyers also took 19 days to finalize purchases in December, and that was actually the slowest pace of sales since February.
10. Rohnert Park: Homes in this Sonoma County city sold in an average of 22 days last month, the quickest pace of sales recorded over the past two years.