Pressure Beneath the Surface
This past quarter has been genuinely hard for my buyer clients, especially dual-income households entering the Northside San Francisco market without overreaching. These are prepared, smart buyers who are doing the math carefully. And yet, what I’m seeing over and over is that around $2M has quietly become a new entry point, while inventory simply hasn’t shown up to meet it. Two-bedroom condos are trading at prices that would have felt like move-up homes not that long ago, and December doesn’t help because most sellers are firmly in holiday mode. What’s been more interesting to watch is that this price creep isn’t isolated to one segment of the market, and it’s starting to show up well beyond entry level, including $5M and above.
What I keep coming back to is that demand is not fading. Instead, demand is piling up. When prices move faster than inventory, the market can look stalled from the outside, even though there’s a lot of pressure building underneath. That pressure has shown up clearly in buyer conversations all fall, and it’s been loud and consistent.
December always makes things harder to read because activity drops across the board. But historically, January is when the picture sharpens. Many sellers still seem anchored to an older version of the market, while buyers have already adjusted. That mismatch is usually where movement starts, not because anything dramatic changes overnight, but because awareness does.
This market doesn’t reward constant urgency. It rewards buyers who can be patient between opportunities and decisive when the right one appears. As we head into the new year, my role isn’t to predict outcomes or push urgency. It’s to help clients understand where leverage is starting to shift and where patience still matters.
