YOUR GUIDE TO THE MARKET, HOMES & LOCAL LIFE

by Kalani Stone

Labor Day Weekend Edition | Santa Cruz County

A quick look at what’s happening in our market, what I’m watching, and a few ways to enjoy the long weekend around Santa Cruz County.

Guiding you home with Aloha

Opening the Right Doors, Not Just Any Door

In This Week's Sand Club

Nobody Wants to Hear This: The Market Is Actually Balanced

Everywhere you look right now, someone's telling you housing is in crisis. It sells papers, it sells campaigns, and it sells clicks. So let's just do the math on our own county instead of taking anyone's word for it: 419 active single family homes, and homes are selling at a pace of about 27 a week. Multiply that out and you get roughly 116 sales a month — which means it would take just under 4 months to sell through everything currently on the market at that pace. That's what "months of supply" means in real estate, and anything in the 4-to-6-month range gets called a balanced market. We're sitting right at that line. Under 4 months and sellers have all the leverage. Over 6 and buyers do. We're right in the middle — not a broken market, not a frantic one.

The 110 days on market and 39% reduction rate aren't a warning sign — they're what it looks like when sellers price realistically instead of chasing a number, and buyers actually get time to look before they commit. Compare that to a market where everything sells in 3 days with 10 offers over asking. That's not healthier — it's just tilted hard toward the seller. What we have now is the opposite extreme's opposite extreme: nobody's desperate, and nobody's stuck.

The homes priced right, staged right, and shown well are still moving fast — those are your serious sellers, and they're easy to spot. The ones sitting longer aren't necessarily less serious, but they do give buyers more room to negotiate real terms. For anyone in a move-up or right-sizing situation, that's the actual advantage: time to find the right fit instead of settling for whatever's left after a bidding war.

Fed Chair Kevin Warsh touched on something related at Jackson Hole last week — he flagged that prices elsewhere in the economy are still climbing, with core inflation sitting around 3.7%. Home values nationally are barely moving by comparison. So even in a market where prices look flat on paper, they're not really keeping pace with everything else. That's part of why "the market" feels so different depending on who you ask and what they're comparing it to — it depends whether you're measuring against last year's price tag or against what a dollar actually buys today.

One more number worth mentioning, mostly so it doesn't get confused with what's happening here: new home supply nationally just hit 9.6 months — but that's concentrated in markets like Texas and Florida, where builders overbuilt because land was cheap and building was easy. That's not our story. Coastal Santa Cruz and Santa Clara County stay tight because building here is slow and expensive by comparison, which is exactly why our numbers hold steady instead of swinging with the national headlines. If you're relocating from one of those markets, that's a real difference worth understanding before you compare notes.

If any of this has you wondering what your own equity, timing, or options actually look like right now, I'd love to talk it through with you. Numbers only mean so much until we connect them to your specific situation. Call, text, or reply to this email anytime — 831-252-2270.

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