This is the weekly update from Coldwell Banker, Northern California COO, Avram Goldman:

The Easter Bunny, Spring break and the last (hopefully) of the rain put a bit of a damper on the market. We saw fewer multiple offers and listings come on the market. However that didn’t stop buyers in certain markets that seemed to power right through it---Central and Southern Marin, Danville, most parts of San Francisco, Palo Alto and parts of Menlo Park seemed unfazed. The San Rafael office had 17 opens for the week and So Marin had a $3.1 mil. home sell with 6 offers. In San Francisco we had strong multiple offer activity with the offices having between 25-50% of their offers involved in multiples and this figure does not include pre-emptive offers. A listing in our Van Ness office at $4.75 mil. received 5 offers. In San Mateo we had a listing at $1.248 mil. garnering 9 offers and a listing in Portola Valley at $1.325mil received 4 offers. These were all homes in inventory short markets that were priced competitively.

San Mateo and San Francisco counties still have a lack of inventory to supply the current demand. Overall inventories remain in the 2-4 month range for our markets. Again this reflects a balanced market. Open houses for the most part were active. Buyers are still more cautious than they were last year and most sellers still need to negotiate with buyers unlike a year ago.

With the weather clearing we will watch with great interest to see if more inventory begins to come on the market. Certainly, if that inventory is priced and presented properly we should see an increase in sales.

Here are the numbers for the week of April 10-16^th: 

5 offices reported increasing inventories, 19 steady and 3 declining---sales activity showed 5 offices increasing 16 steady and 6 declining.

Avram