Home prices in Bay Area at new high: San Mateo County sees highest increase; sales dropping for third straight month

Sales were down 6.5 percent from last year, to 8,679 homes sold.

Among the Bay Area’s nine counties, home prices rose in four and dropped in five.

The highest increase was 4.4 percent in San Mateo County, followed by 2.9 percent in San Francisco. The median price in San Francisco is $1,170,000 and in San Mateo County is $1,070,000, the highest prices in the Bay Area.

The lowest prices are in Solano, Sonoma, Napa and Contra Costa counties, according to the firm. In Solano County, the median home price was $375,000, which is the lowest in the region.

“Prices in today’s market and during the last housing boom were fueled in part by job growth, consumer confidence and tight supply,” CoreLogic research analyst Andrew LePage said in a statement.

“While the current cycle has received a boost from historically low mortgage rates — about 3.6 percent recently compared with the 6-percent range in the last cycle — the last cycle benefited from loose underwriting and high-risk ‘subprime’ home loans that allowed borrowers to stretch to their financial max, if not well beyond,” LePage said.

Kim Ott, president of the Bay East Association of Realtors, said inventory is tighter than even last year as people continue to move into the San Francisco region, and people who already live in the area are staying put.

“When I first started in this business, (homes) were turning over about every five to seven years,” said Ott, who has been in the industry since 1999. “Now, it’s seven to 10 years. They are staying in their homes, and that also affects the inventory.”

Sales in Alameda County, which includes the city of Oakland, dropped nearly 10 percent from a year ago while the median price increased more than 7 percent to $705,000.

In the heart of Silicon Valley, sales of homes in Santa Clara County declined 7 percent as the median price increased 4.5 percent to $860,000.

“The affordability crunch is significant, and it’s constraining sales,” said CoreLogic research analyst Andrew LePage.

But home-hunters on a budget should take heart: Prices are stabilizing in some areas, said David Stark, Bay East’s public affairs director.

“Prices are still going up,” he said, “just not as aggressively or rapidly as we’ve seen the last few years.”

Statewide, the median price of a California home was $439,000, up nearly 6 percent from last June. Buyers closed on more than 45,200 homes last month, down 3 percent from a year ago.

In Southern California, sales remained flat from a year ago. The median price was $464,000 in the six-county area, up 5 percent from last year. About 24,300 homes were sold in June.

The median price in Southern California ranged from a low of $285,000 in the inland county of San Bernardino to a high of $657,500 in Orange County.