Merced County home prices are approaching all-time records. See what buyers are paying
The median price of a single-family home continues to increase in Merced County, reaching its highest mark in 15 years.
Plus, the latest data shows the prices aren’t going down anytime soon.
In Merced, the median price of a single-family home in May was $330,000, a 21.3% increase from the median price of $272,000 a year ago in May 2020, according to data from the California Association of Realtors.
Most of the cities in Merced County have seen similar price increases with Atwater increasing from $283,000 in May 2020 to $365,000 this year. Year-over-year Livingston home prices increased from $310,000 to $375,000 and Los Banos rose from $348,000 to $422,000.
The trend isn’t just in Merced County. For example, May 2021 home sales in the 12-county Central Valley region from north of Sacramento south to Kern County were up 44% from a year earlier. Additionally, the median selling price (the midpoint at which half of homes sold for more and half for less) reached $445,000 for the first time ever, the data shows.
Prices approaching ‘06 high mark
Prices are surging toward the record for a median priced home in Merced of $344,500, which was set in October 2006.
“Our local housing market — like much of the country — continues to face a shortage in listing inventory during an historically high demand for homes; resulting in local prices continuing to escalate,” said Terry Ruscoe, an agent for Better Homes and Gardens, Everything Real Estate.
Ruscoe says there are many factors pointing to an increase in housing prices going forward. Ruscoe feels a much larger and robust economy overall, a more diverse employment pool, lower post-Covid unemployment rates and higher paying jobs combined with low interest rates will result in the current trend of increasing home prices.
The relentless upward march in home prices comes as more Californians express worry about the rising cost of housing. Ninety percent of Californians are concerned about housing prices, according to a March report by the Public Policy Institute of California. In February 2020, in a previous PPIC survey, only 63% of the state’s residents said housing affordability was a big problem.
That, however, was before the coronavirus pandemic. Over the past 15 months, the median price of a home statewide has climbed by more than 41%, almost 31% in the Central Valley.
COVID-19 shut down many office workplaces, prompting employers to let their staff work remotely from home. people with stable incomes were largely unaffected by the recession triggered by the pandemic.
While demand among buyers has increased substantially, the supply of homes has not been able to keep up. Real-estate pros report that many homes are selling quickly, and often for more than the asking price as sellers receive multiple offers for their property.
A year ago, for example, the median time that a house was on market before it sold was 13 days. The time on the market is now less than half that, at six days. And the average selling price is now typically 103.5% of the seller’s asking price.
But instead of continuing to come down, as it did for much of the past year, that six-day figure has been unchanged for the past three months.
Is that – along with real estate experts in the Sacramento area reporting fewer homes attracting multiple offers – a possible sign of stabilization of the market, if not a slowdown?
“My take is that the data is starting to show some limits to what buyers are willing and able to pay,” economist Jeffrey Michael of the University of the Pacific told The Sacramento Bee earlier this month.
This story was originally published June 30, 2021 at 10:46 AM.
