My famous refrain as a Realtor: "There will be more houses after the Super Bowl!"

Whether or not you’re tired of hearing about inventory shortages in the Bay Area housing market, they’re real; and let's hope our football axiom opens things up a bit for buyers, while posting some needed fresh comps for sellers' valuations. Inventory figures from the last month of 2013 suggest that the shortage of available homes is as acute now as it’s ever been.

December is traditionally one of the slowest months of the real estate year. Everyone’s either on vacation or feeling the holiday pinch. Many agents, in fact, advise their clients to wait until after the first of the new year to list their properties, though some feel listing in December offers a captive audience of serious buyers – sans casual look-e-loos. Still, as recently as 2010, Peninsula for-sale inventory for December was at 1,284, the high-water mark for the past five years.

Since then, available inventory has dropped each December, at first slowly (to 1,150 in 2011) and then precipitously (549 in 2012). In 2013, the flow of homes for sale slowed to a trickle: 385. That’s 70 percent less housing out there for buyers, which means 70 percent more demand for what’s left. While inventory has fallen by almost three-fourths, total sales during that same period have dropped only by 14.5 percent, from 372 (2010) to 318 (2013). Maybe that’s why the county median price for December 2013 ($1.03 million) is 139 percent of what it was in 2010 ($719,500).

I work primarily in Hillsborough, Burlingame and San Mateo where the story is more of the same. Burlingame, with its popular $1.5 - $2.5 sweet spot, has been particularly vexing, with just 9 available single-family homes available as of this writing. The good news is that 2013 available Hillsborough real estate homes for sale is down only 24.4 percent from 2010; in San Mateo, it’s down 85 percent and in Burlingame, where four homes remained for sale at the close of December, inventory had fallen 88 percent since December 2010.

I’d love to say that the situation has eased since the turn of the new year, but it hasn’t. Though the high-end nature of properties keeps Hillsborough homes on the market much longer than in other cities (an average of 76 DOM in December, compared to 44 in San Mateo and an otherworldly 12 in Burlingame), inventory during the second week of January was holding fast at 31. In San Mateo, though, a city of almost 100,000 people, there were 24 active single-family listings and 26 active condos, making it a wide-open compared to the neighboring Burlingame real estate market, where home counts in the single digits are reality for single family and condos.

Elsewhere on the Peninsula the story is the same, including one day in January when the city of Belmont had but one single-family home on the active market. The lack of available for-sale real estate is the single most influential metric in our supply/demand Peninsula real estate model: for Sellers the rarity of a prime listing will attract the pent-up demand of scores of buyers unfulfilled from 2013. For Buyers, the question becomes: How many more opportunities will I have this year to choose from? Four, Six, Eight? Grabbing something good when it presents itself begins to make a lot of sense.

For my clients' best advantage, I have continued to unearth off-market opportunities through my intelligence network. Times like these call for the insider moxy that only a seasoned and well-respected top producing Realtor can deliver. Call me today and we'll beat the inventory blues together. (650) 455-3735

GO Denver!