Home price acceleration is cooling amid some disappointing tech IPOs
The Bay Area real estate boom which has been driven for the past decade by the fast-rising and high-valued technology industry, appears to be easing.
The median price of a home in the area slowed in 2019 to a year-over-year growth of 1.6% (to $1.6 million), representing the smallest rise since 2012.
Real estate brokerage Compass says that in Santa Clara County, home to San Jose and Palo Alto, the median price was down 6% to $1.26 million.
Bloomberg reports that the tech sector disappointed in 2019 with several highly-anticipated IPOs that failed to meet their expectation including Lyft, Uber, and Slack.
These were expected to continue the momentum of the fast rise in both scale and valuations seen by big tech firms such as Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google – the so called FANG firms – which have boosted residential real estate prices.
The exception to the slowing rise in prices in the Bay Area is the Oakland-Berkeley region. This gained 4% in 2019 to $860,000 as San Francisco prices proved too much for homebuyers.
