There are more homes for sale in San Diego in recent weeks. Here’s why it’s hard to notice

You might not have noticed but there were more San Diego homes for sale in the past few weeks.

There were 970 new homes listed for sale in San Diego County from May 24 to June 20, said the Redfin Data Center. While small compared with most metros, that’s almost double the 450 to 500 new listings per month San Diego County was adding at the start of the year.

Why the uptick in inventory? Real estate agents say sellers feel more comfortable moving out of homes and putting them on the market now that the population is more fully vaccinated against COVID-19. Also, significant price increases are motivating some sellers to finally pull the trigger.

Still, it might be hard for a frustrated home shopper to notice a huge difference yet. Redfin said 71.2 percent of homes in San Diego County are off the market in two weeks or less.

Taylor Marr, lead economist at Redfin, said pending sales in San Diego County have been exceeding past years’ levels for several months, which shows a lot of activity even though a casual industry watcher may not see big movements in inventory.

“A picture emerges that the extra supply that has been coming on the market in San Diego has really allowed buyers to make more offers,” he said. “But we haven’t seen the same buildup of homes sitting on the market long-term.”

If you look at the overall number of homes for sale in San Diego County, it is still at historic lows. There were 3,990 homes for sale from May 24 to June 20. That is below even 2020 with stay-at-home orders in place when there were around 6,260 at the same time. The same goes for 2019 with 8,561 homes listed; 2018 with 8,064 and 7,185 in 2017.

So, while there have been more new listings in recent weeks, they have been selling so fast that inventory totals don’t have the chance to grow. For instance, around this time last year, about half of homes were selling in two weeks or less (compared with more than 70 percent now). That meant a home that went on the market in May might still be there in June or July — whereas now there is no buildup in supply because new listings are snatched up so rapidly.

Redfin economists, and most housing analysts, predict that an increase in homes for sale will slow price increases because there will be less need for bidding wars among buyers. The median home price in San Diego County hit a record high of $725,000 in May, said DQNews, up 23 percent in a year.

Evan Morris, a real estate agent based in Golden Hill, said he recently got three new listings from sellers who wanted to take advantage of major price gains. He said he had done analysis for all the sellers last year to show how much they could earn if they sold (factoring in things like capital gains tax and sale price) but the benefits weren’t enough to motivate them at the time.

Now, Morris said one seller is looking to use the profits from a condo for a down payment on a single-family house and the other two are investors who had been using the properties as rentals but now want to cash out.

Most housing analysts predict home inventory across the nation will continue to increase as the economy increasingly opens up from COVID-19 restrictions. Zillow Research forecasts home sales in 2021 will exceed the number in 2020, but recently revised its prediction from earlier this year because of continued low inventory. It now predicts 5.91 million home sales this year, down from an estimate earlier in the year of 6.2 million.

San Diego metro area (which includes all of San Diego County) is in the middle of the pack with its 970 new listings compared with similar-sized metros. Dallas added 1,796 new listings in the same time period while San Jose added 465.

Part of the reason Texas metros exceed California markets is a stronger homebuilding industry. A Realtor.com study predicted Dallas would have the most home construction of any U.S. metro in 2021 based on an analysis of building permits. The other top cities were New York, Phoenix, Washington, D.C. and Atlanta.