Big cities seem to be making a comeback as places where people want to buy homes.
San Francisco leads the list of the nation’s most populous metropolitan areas where more homes are selling above their initial listing price in February in a new analysis by Redfin, the nation’s largest brokerage website.
Half of the eight metro areas seeing the uptick are in the Bay Area of California or in New York, according to Redfin’s listing by percentage point increases in how many homes sold for more than their original listing price:
- San Francisco, up 7.5 percentage points
- Nassau County, New York, up 4.4 percentage points
- San Jose, California, up 3.5 percentage points
- Milwaukee, up 2.7 percentage points
- San Antonio, Texas, up 2.4 percentage points
- New York, up 2.2 percentage points
- Portland, Oregon, up 1.4 percentage points
- Philadelphia, up 0.8 percentage points
Bay Area real estate agent Josh Felder credited the bump that saw 57.2% of homes in San Francisco selling higher than listed in February with pent-up demand.
“The Bay Area has an unending population of people with enormous swaths of money,” Felder told Redfin. “A decade or so ago, we all thought the growth in home prices was unsustainable, but they just keep going up and up.”
The reason for that trajectory, he said, is “partly because there aren’t enough homes for sale, and partly because tech continues to boom despite ups and downs in the stock market and geopolitical uncertainty.”
But Felder said the Bay Area market slowed in March due to buyers holding out for more properties to choose from. And, he said, the “market is actually somewhat restrained” compared to before the COVID-19 pandemic.
That’s when many residents of American cities, suddenly able to work from anywhere, left for cheaper communities, particularly in the West, impacting Utah. In 2021, The New York Times ranked Heber City‘s 4.7% annual change in net in-migration at No. 5 nationally.
No Utah cities were included in the new Redfin analysis, which looked at the nation’s 50 most-populous metro areas. Nationwide, the percentage of homes that sold for more than their original list price in February dropped to 20.5% from 22.8% a year earlier.
Just over 15% sold for the asking price, the lowest February share since 2019.
Sellers are increasingly getting less than they seek because, Redfin says, “2025 is shaping up to be a buyer’s market" thanks to high mortgage rates and more inventory. That’s in contrast to the rapid rise in what homes sold for during the pandemic.
San Diego topped the list of big cities where more buyers paid below the listing price in February. The Southern California city saw 51.2% of homes sold below the original list price, an increase of 8.9 percentage points year over year.
Next up on that list was Anaheim, California, where the increase in homes that sold for less than asking was up 8.7 percentage points, followed by Charlotte, North Carolina, and Atlanta, both up 7.3 percentage points; and Sacramento, California, up 6.8 percentage points.