Why Homes Aren't Selling in Most of America (But San Mateo County Is a Different Story)

If you've read any national housing headlines lately, you've probably seen some version of "the market is cooling." That's true. But it's not true everywhere, and the gap between what's happening in most of the country and what's happening here on the Peninsula has gotten wide enough that it's worth talking about plainly.

The rest of the country has the flu. San Mateo County, at worst, has a cold.

What's actually happening nationally

Austin has become the poster child for the correction, and for good reason. Depending on which index you look at, home values there are down somewhere between 24% and 27% from their May 2022 peak. But Austin is far from alone. A recent tally of 33 large, expensive U.S. cities found that 28 of them are now sitting below their prior peaks, including New Orleans (down about 19%), Washington D.C. and Denver (each down around 13%), and Phoenix and Fort Worth (each down roughly 10-11%).

Florida tells a similar story from a different cause. The Cape Coral-Fort Myers area has seen the sharpest drop of any metro tracked by ATTOM, with median prices down about 9% year-over-year, driven largely by skyrocketing insurance costs following hurricane damage. Tampa and Phoenix are both seeing close to 30% of active listings carry a price cut, and other pandemic boomtowns like Boise, Las Vegas, and San Antonio are all working through similar corrections.

This isn't just a Texas story, or even just a Sun Belt story. It's showing up across most of the metros that boomed hardest during the pandemic: more inventory, longer days on market, and sellers who listed at 2022 prices getting a hard lesson in what the market will actually bear in 2026. Mortgage rates in the mid-6% range haven't helped. Buyers who could stretch for a home two years ago are sitting this one out, and that's thinning out demand in markets that don't have another source of buying power to fall back on.

What's different here

San Mateo County doesn't have that problem, because it has something most of the country doesn't: a heavy concentration of employees at AI companies who are sitting on real, liquid wealth.

OpenAI alone let employees sell around $10 billion in stock in the fourth quarter of 2025. Nvidia's workforce tells a similar story. Employee surveys put a large share of the company at millionaire status once their equity is counted, and when you apply those percentages across Nvidia's headcount, you land on roughly 27,000 employees who've crossed that threshold. That's one company. Add in Google, Anthropic, Meta, Perplexity, and the rest of the AI ecosystem clustered around the Bay, and you start to understand why our local market doesn't look like Austin's.

That money has to go somewhere, and a lot of it is going into homes in Burlingame, Hillsborough, San Mateo, Foster City, Belmont, San Carlos, Redwood City, and Menlo Park. The numbers back it up: median home prices across the county are up somewhere between 6% and 10% year-over-year depending on which report you read, inventory sits at under two months of supply, and roughly three out of four single-family homes are still selling over asking. The $5 million-plus segment, the part of the market most sensitive to buyer confidence, saw sales jump 27% year-over-year.

What this means if you're buying or selling

If you're selling, this is not the time to price defensively out of habit or out of headlines you've read about the rest of the country. Buyers here are still competing, and pricing too low can leave real money on the table.

If you're buying, understand that "waiting for the market to soften" is a strategy that's working in Dallas and Austin right now. It is not working the same way here, and treating San Mateo County like it's part of the national trend is likely to cost you time and leverage.

The takeaway isn't that our market is immune to everything. Rates still matter, and if AI-sector hiring or spending slows meaningfully, this county would feel it too. But right now, the fundamentals here are simply different from what's driving headlines nationally, and pretending otherwise doesn't serve buyers or sellers well.

Thinking about your next step?

If you want a read on what a specific neighborhood or price point is actually doing right now, reach out. I'll give you the real numbers, not the national narrative.