{"id":344885,"date":"2026-06-03T15:13:19","date_gmt":"2026-06-03T15:13:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/344885\/"},"modified":"2026-06-03T15:13:19","modified_gmt":"2026-06-03T15:13:19","slug":"shrinking-housing-supply-in-sacramento","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/344885\/","title":{"rendered":"shrinking housing supply in Sacramento"},"content":{"rendered":"

The big news lately is housing supply has been shrinking. Some of this is due to more buyers in the game right now, but we\u2019re also seeing sellers step back from listing homes. Some new visuals today as well as thoughts on wasting energy on obsessing over lower rates.<\/p>\n

This post is designed to skim quickly by topic or digest slowly.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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UPCOMING SPEAKING GIGS:<\/p>\n

6\/24\/26 Windermere Sierra Oaks Q&A
7\/1\/26 Wisdom Wednesday in Elk Grove
7\/13\/26 LPT Realty Zoom\u00a0
7\/14\/26 Elk Grove Presentation TBD
7\/15\/26 Stockton Presentation TBD
8\/6\/26 PCAR Auburn
9\/1\/26 TBA
10\/2\/26 PCAR Rocklin
10\/21\/26 Coldwell Banker Sierra Oaks \/ EDH<\/p>\n

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THE LOWEST & HIGHEST PRICES IN 2026<\/p>\n

Where are buyers purchasing? Here are the top areas in 2026 so far at the lowest and highest prices in the Sacramento region. Let me know if you like these visuals. I thought it would be cool to show things this way.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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SELLERS HAVE BEEN SHRINKING BACK LATELY<\/p>\n

This is big news. It looks like increased uncertainty this year is starting to affect seller behavior. Think Iran War and inflation. What I mean is sellers have started to not list homes as much in 2026. This was a problem last year where sellers really stepped back during the second half of 2025. Yet, sellers started coming back to the market, and that\u2019s why we saw five months in a row of finally being back above 2024 levels of new listings. But then May 2026 sunk back below 2024 levels again (doh!!!). This isn\u2019t a drastic change, but I think it\u2019s been enough to make the housing market feel a little tighter since there isn\u2019t as much supply out there. Frankly, this is a step in the wrong direction for affordability. If we want the housing market to heal, we need more listings.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Here\u2019s a different way to look at it. The low point of seller activity was 2023, and we\u2019ve improved since then, but sellers backed off in mid-2025, and both April and May 2026 have been lackluster. The longer these lines remain subdued, the longer the housing market feels stuck.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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GIVING UP LOW RATES<\/p>\n

It feels like sellers will never give up a low rate, and some won\u2019t, but we\u2019re starting to see more owners list their homes despite a low rate. About 15% of all current local listings have sold previously on MLS between 2020 and 2025, and there are definitely some low rates mixed in there.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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NOT AS MANY OPTIONS FOR BUYERS<\/p>\n

Sellers aren\u2019t flooding the market. That\u2019s often the narrative online, but here we are with sellers actually pulling back a little. The number of active listings is down 6% from year ago, so there aren\u2019t technically as many options for buyers. Yet, part of this number being lower is about more buyers getting into contract (more on that below).\u00a0<\/p>\n

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HIGHER BUYER DEMAND DESPITE RATE HIKES<\/p>\n

Some good news here. Mortgage rates went from 6% in January to above 6.5% lately, but it hasn\u2019t really phased buyers. I\u2019m not saying this uptick is not meaningful, but we\u2019ve had more pending contracts in recent months despite rates rising. This is why we\u2019ve had slightly higher closed sales volume so far. It\u2019s only slightly more volume, but that\u2019s on brand for 2026. The goal is to see the housing market a little less stuck.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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WASTING TIME & ENERGY ON RATES<\/p>\n

Think about all the attention spent on rates increasing since January and how that could squash buyer demand. Yet, here we are with a little more buyer volume nationally and locally despite the uptick. I\u2019m not saying rates don\u2019t matter because they do, but if you work in real estate, maybe focus your attention on building relationships with people rather than obsessing over daily rate changes. Backing up, the message over the past four years has been that rates would be coming down soon. Trust me bro. But here we are with rates that are still pretty similar to what they were four years ago. At some point, I guess we need to recognize all this worry and attention spent on rates hasn\u2019t made much of a difference. There is a lesson in there.<\/p>\n

One more thing. It\u2019s really difficult to accurately predict mortgage rates. Almost nobody gets it right. This doesn\u2019t mean I don\u2019t want to hear what people think. Loan officer friends in particular, I want to hear your take, so please keep sharing. Let\u2019s just concede that predicting rates isn\u2019t so easy since there are so many moving parts. And let\u2019s be real that some real estate professionals get sucked into a narrative that fixates on rates, and that can be limiting.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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A LITTLE MORE DISTRESS IS THE VIBE<\/p>\n

In most local counties, I\u2019m seeing a slight bump in short sales. Here\u2019s something from a presentation last week in Solano County. Ultimately, we don\u2019t have a distressed housing market, but we are seeing a little more distress. And we should expect to see more distress ahead since we\u2019ve bottomed out after the pandemic and we\u2019re seeing an increase in mortgage delinquencies. A big issue here is prices have been pretty flat for years, so if someone bought 4-5 years ago, it\u2019s possible there hasn\u2019t been much growth (or maybe it\u2019s worth less). This is where low-down FHA and VA borrowers are more prone to have to do a short sale.\u00a0<\/p>\n

NOTE: I find people either minimize the growth since it\u2019s nothing compared to what it used to be like, or they get sensational and say short sales increased 900% since 2024 (don\u2019t do that). My advice? Let\u2019s just recognize a little growth and keep things in context.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u201cI\u2019M NOT SEEING THE EXTRA VOLUME AT ALL\u201d<\/p>\n

I had a great conversation recently from someone who said she just wasn\u2019t seeing all this extra volume I\u2019ve been talking about, and others have felt the same too. Well, I\u2019ve only ever mentioned that we have a little extra, so let\u2019s be clear about that. To date, volume has been 2% better this year. Here\u2019s a good way to think about it. If someone gained or lost 2% of their weight, would you notice? Probably not. It\u2019s similar with the housing market. Yet, just because you don\u2019t notice doesn\u2019t mean it hasn\u2019t happened. This is where we want to be careful to see the forest through the trees. Sometimes our subjective experience gets in the way of seeing the trend.\u00a0<\/p>\n

WHERE IS THE EXTRA VOLUME?<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve seen about 2% more closed sales volume this year in the four-county region, and Sacramento County has been the culprit for the most change so far. Moreover, it\u2019s extra buyers between $400K to $500K as the largest category of growth<\/a>. It\u2019s honestly too early to pull closed stats for May, and the numbers will look a little better next week when I finalize the stats.<\/p>\n

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More at the bottom. And a little more at the top. Preliminary stats for May.<\/p>\n

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Anyway, I hope that was helpful. Thanks for being here.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Question: What are you hearing from buyers and sellers right now? Have you felt the market tighten in recent months?\u00a0<\/p>\n

If you liked this post,\u00a0subscribe by email\u00a0<\/a>(or\u00a0RSS).<\/a>\u00a0Thanks for being here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The big news lately is housing supply has been shrinking. Some of this is due to more buyers…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":344886,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[121,123,122],"class_list":["post-344885","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sacramento","tag-sacramento","tag-sacramento-headlines","tag-sacramento-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344885","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=344885"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344885\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/344886"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=344885"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=344885"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=344885"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}