Bay Area home sales up from last month, down from last year

SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- Bay Area housing prices have rebounded since the recession, but fear of another collapse in the market has been building. Bay Area experts say they're seeing signs of a slowdown.

On California's forever moving housing rollercoaster, home sales in the Bay Area are up from last month but down from last year.

A CoreLogic report found a slowdown in Alameda County from over 1,300 homes sold in March of 2015 to about 1,200 in March of 2016.

Numbers are also down in San Francisco County, where sky high prices are pushing buyers out. There's an increase in Contra Costa County.

ABC7 News asked Christopher Palmer, assistant professor of real estate at UC Berkeley, if this is any indication a housing bubble is about to burst.

"Every time there's kind of flattening like this or any kind of softening in the market, everyone wants to say maybe this is the beginning of the end," he said. "And it's really hard to know that from any given episode. But it doesn't really seem like that at this point."

Realtor Eileen Ericson says this trend is not unusual and inventory is still low.

"We're coming out of January, February, March," she said. "They tend to go down a little bit. They come up in the spring. Then in August and September they start to go down again. So it's cyclical."

The study also finds the 1.4 percent growth in median home prices the smallest gain in years. Homes are on the market a few weeks longer than usual.

Ericson says there's a reason for that.

"Buyers are wanting to still get a bargain," she said. "So when they're looking at prices they're not jumping on a house right away."

So how much are Bay Area homes going for these days? The median price last month was $643,000.