California Condo Prices Crash by Up to 40% in Some Areas – Newsweek

Condo owners in parts of California are slashing asking prices by as much as 40 percent for their properties listed for sale on Zillow, according to data available on the real estate marketplace app.

As of Wednesday morning, there were a total of 8,476 condos listed for sale on Zillow across all of California. Of these, 1,973 have had their initial asking price reduced by sellers. A majority of these price reductions on condos were focused around San Francisco, San Jose and Los Angeles.

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Vacation rental investor Rohin Dhar, who routinely posts on social media about the most dramatic price drops in the market, shared the listing for a San Francisco condo which saw its asking price drastically plunge in the past few years.

The 2-bedroom, 2-bathroom condo in the heart of San Francisco was initially sold in May 2015 for over $2 million. In May 2022, when it appeared again on the market, it saw its price slashed first to $1,780,000 and then to $1,680,000. The listing was removed a couple of months later, and the property was re-listed on Zillow in September 2022 for $1,595,000. A month later, the price dropped to $1,495,000.

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And the property was no tough sell. At 1,426 square feet, the sun-filled apartment situated in a building constructed in the year 2000 has stunning views of the city and it’s located in the same block as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

While it appears from the property’s listing history that the condo was put up for renting for a while and then again for sale between 2022 and 2023, on May 20 it was listed for sale again for $1,275,000. It was ultimately sold for $1,167,500 on June 3—at least a 41 percent drop from the price it sold for almost a decade ago, and despite the fact that house prices are again on the rise in the city.

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In April, according to the latest data made available by Redfin, the median sale price of a home in San Francisco was $1,400,000, up 3.7 percent compared to a year earlier.

Newsweek contacted Zillow for comment by email on Wednesday morning.

Prices in San Francisco briefly spiralled down in late 2023, when the U.S. housing market was experiencing a pricing correction following the booming years of the pandemic and the sudden rise of mortgage rates.

In December 2023, Redfin recorded a 6.7 percent year-over-year plunge in the median sale price of a home in San Francisco to $1.2 million. Since then, prices have been steadily climbing back, though they have not reached the April 2022 peak of $1.6 million.

Another listing shared by Dhar on X shows a condo for sale in San Francisco’s Russian Hill neighborhood which was originally purchased for $3.2 million in 2016 and sold again on June 3 for $2.25 million—$950,000 less—at least a 29 percent drop from what it fetched eight years ago.

The drop of condo prices in San Francisco is likely linked to the particular challenges the city has been facing since the pandemic, including the mass exodus of workers which have left several of its downtown offices empty.

But it’s also likely linked to how expensive the city still is: add that up to the fact that mortgage rates are still around the 7 percent mark, and if sellers want to offload their properties, they need to try to attract discouraged buyers with price reductions.