Biggest Discounts February Update

Let’s have an update on where buyers are currently getting the biggest discount off the asking price. Our goal in sharing this data is to help potential buyers to know which neighborhoods are softer in terms of sale price discounts off list price, to better equip you when making an offer, and help you know where to look for potential bargains.

In the charts below, we have taken all sales data from the last two months in Redfin’s Bay Area service area and sorted it by city. (Usually we sort by zip code, but this month I was unable to obtain zip code data.) We calculated the overall difference between the sale price and the list price. Note that this reflects the final list price, after all price drops in the listing. Any cities with fewer than ten sales are excluded from the top and bottom ten rankings, but interested readers may download the full data summary in Excel format (xls).

Here are the top ten cities with the largest overall discount:

There is a definite trend of more expensive cities showing the largest discounts in the Bay Area. None of the top ten cities with the largest discounts had an average list price below $500,000, and four came in over $1 million.

Here are the ten cities with the smallest discounts:

17 of the 60 cities we ranked came in with discounts under 2%, indicating that either buyers are more willing to pay asking price or sellers in those regions are better at pricing their homes appropriately to the market in the first place. Only East Palo Alto, Castrovaey, and San Lorenzo had homes that sold on average for more than asking.

Only two of the top 10 cities where homes sold for low discounts or over asking had an average list price above $400k (Daly City and Castrovaey).

Of the 3,838 sales we tracked in the 2-month period, 78 homes sold for 20% or more off the asking price, while 1,122 homes sold for more than asking.