May 2019

Happy May. May I? May we? I was thinking about the idea of comfort zones and achieving dreams. Can you do the latter without the breaking out of the former? Highly doubtful. We see examples of it, every day, if we’re looking.

– Basketball player Kevin Durant leaves a team, a city, an environment he’s completely comfortable with, to join the Warriors because he dreamt of winning a championship. Boom…back to back championships, back to back MVP status.

– Robert Refkin, CEO and co-founder of Compass, was comfortably ensconced in a prestigious position at Goldman Sachs, but dreamt of creating a real estate juggernaut partly based on the premise, “If Apple got into real estate, what would that look like?” The single child of a single mother (a real estate agent), he was determined to create a real estate company where agents mattered, the polar opposite from most established firms, and new firms (“aggregators”) seeking to “cut the agent out” of the home buying and selling process. Founded a mere 7 years ago in 2012, in New York City, Compass is on track to control 20% of the market share in the top 20 US markets by 2020. Building this company meant leaving the comfort of his young family on cross-country sojourns, and being available 24/5 – he’s kept his promise of always being home with his family on weekends. I couldn’t imagine living with the schedule he has, which is why I don’t run a $4.4 billion company.

– As Realtors, Natalie and I meet people almost daily who have the dream of home ownership. It’s a daunting goal, and not easily achievable here in the Bay Area. For sellers who have been settled in a place they’ve loved for a long time, letting go can be difficult. But even on this level, there is a dream to achieve, a promise of “better” for themselves and their families yet to come.

Leaving a community, lifestyle, culture, relationship, job, salary – comfort – because there’s a bigger goal you can’t shake takes a lot of courage…more so, the older you are. Giving yourself permission is the first step of reaching your dream.

by Patrick Carlisle, Market Analyst for Compass Bay Area

With April’s end, we now have 2 months of spring season data unaffected by the end of 2018, when financial markets plunged. As of early May 2019, stock markets have recovered to hit new highs, interest rates are far lower than last year’s peak, and our local, unicorn IPOs have begun to roll out after a media frenzy of speculation on their potential effects on the market.

The market has heated up considerably from the slowdown in the second half of 2018, with strong buyer demand for a very limited inventory of listings. Median home sales prices have returned to highs close to those in spring 2018, but, so far, last year’s peaks have not been exceeded. This is a big change from the year-over-year appreciation rates of the past 6-7 years.

However, there are still 2 months of spring sales data to come in (before the typical summer slowdown), and word on the street is that some new listings are again generating feverish bidding wars between buyers.