San Jose's Record Cooldown

The median price of a home in San Jose, Calif. fell 8 percent year-over-year in January 2019, in keeping with the trend set in December when the metro had its first annual home price drop since the start of 2012.

Home prices in December dropped 7.3 percent annually, slightly less than the January drop. The median home price in January was $975,000. The first month of 2019 was also the first time home prices fell below the seven-figure mark in last year: the median sale price in the metro crossed the $1 million mark in mid-2017 and hit its peak in April 2018 at $1.3 million, according to Redfin data.

Bidding wars are also at a seven-year low in the San Jose area. Twenty-three percent of offers local Redfin agents wrote on behalf of their homebuying customers faced competition in December, the first time the bidding war rate has dropped below 50 percent since at least January 2012. The rate peaked at 95 percent in January 2018 and it was 83 percent as recently as this past September.

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