



Has Bay Area housing inventory improved in 2026?
I pulled new listings and closed sales for every Bay Area zone, this year versus last, to answer a question I keep seeing: has inventory actually gotten better? Short answer: yes, everywhere, in terms of raw listing counts. But that's not all.
The real finding came from checking how much of that new inventory is actually closing. San Jose's sell-through rate (closings as a share of new listings) fell from 94% a year ago to 70% now, the biggest drop anywhere in the region. Greater Santa Clara County outside San Jose fell almost as much, 90% to 72%. ,That's a market where homes are arriving faster than buyers are absorbing them.
North Bay still omitted.
| Zone | Sell-through, Jan-Jul 2025 | Sell-through, Jan-Jul 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| San Jose | 94% | 70% | -25 points |
| Greater SJ | 90% | 72% | -19 points |
| East Bay | 86% | 79% | -7 points |
| Peninsula | 87% | 80% | -7 points |
| San Francisco | 92% | 88% | -3 points |
Three unrelated signals all confirm it in San Jose and greater Santa Clara: median price down (San Jose -4.5%, Greater SJ -3.7%), days on market up (17 to 20, and 18 to 23), and the share of homes selling over asking down (62.5% to 55.7%, and 59.8% to 57.4%).
San Francisco is doing the exact opposite. Median price up 14%, days on market down to 13, and 71% of closings went over asking, up from 58% a year ago. Tightest market in the region right now, not the loosest.
Months of supply, since this is the cleanest single number for "how much room does a buyer actually have":
| Zone | A year ago | Now |
|---|---|---|
| San Jose | 1.14 | 3.01 |
| Greater SJ | 1.08 | 2.94 |
| East Bay | 1.11 | 1.90 |
| Peninsula | 1.48 | 1.82 |
| San Francisco | 1.61 | 1.12 |
One seasonal pattern pretty much across the board: every year in this data shows a small dip in new listings in August specifically, between a stronger July and a much stronger September. If you're looking to sit it out on the sidelines until there's less buyers in the fall and winter, unfortunately the supply of new listings will seasonally decrease as well (and January of this year had noticeable less new listings than the two years prir.).
On what's ahead: the pace of San Jose's inventory buildup likely slows into the winter, new listings drop faster into the holidays than closings do, so the gap between them narrows. This is a slowdown in the accumulation of new listings, amd the stockpile of unsold homes already built up this year isn't going anywhere before spring.
What this means if you're buying: San Jose and the rest of Santa Clara County outside the city itself are where the real leverage is right now, worth negotiating harder there than the headlines about a tight Bay Area market might suggest. San Francisco is the opposite, as all the leverage in most parts of the city remains with the seller. Peninsula and East Bay are genuinely stable.
The guiding thing to take from all of this: the headline, "new listings are up," isn't actually what's giving buyers more room in San Jose and greater Santa Clara County. The monthly flow of new listings only grew modestly there, 13% to 23%. What actually piled up is the stock, the accumulated supply sitting unsold, up 164% to 172% in those same two zones. Competition is down, but because homes stopped moving as fast as they used to.
Quick methodology note: this isn't a predictive model. It's what's sometimes called a seasonal-naive projection. For each zone, take the actual year-over-year growth rate from the first seven months of 2026, and apply that same percentage to last year's actual month-by-month numbers for August through December. It assumes two things: the growth rate holding steady through the rest of the year, and this year's seasonal shape (the usual November-December drop, the usual pattern of ups and downs) repeating the way it has in the past.
Where this goes into fall and winter, zone by zone, using that method:
In San Jose and Greater SJ, the gap between new listings and closings narrows heading into November and December, and even briefly flips to closings outpacing new listings by year-end. Normal seasonal shape (new listings drop off faster into the holidays than closings do), not a reversal. The inventory that's already piled up this year doesn't clear out just because the monthly math turns favorable for a couple of months, it takes sustained clearing over multiple quarters to work through a buildup like this one. Expect the leverage buyers have right now in those two zones to still be there in January.
East Bay and Peninsula show the same pattern, a brief clearing stretch by December, without it changing the stability in these zones overall.
San Francisco is the one to watch differently. The forecast has new listings spiking hard in September before collapsing into December, while closings hold up better across that stretch, meaning the gap actually flips toward closings outpacing listings by the end of the year there as well. If that continues, San Francisco's market gets even harder to buy into over the winter. Note that this is the forecast I'm least confident about, given the volatility of the SFH market in SF.
As always I am happy to delve deeper into the data. Would you like to see any of the above broken down at the neighborhood level for a particular city?
As always for a more in-depth analysis & more visuals check out the accompanying blog post