San Diego Market Watch - Real Estate Update For January 16, 2026

San Diego County Home Inventory is up again this week. Stick around for a couple of minutes and find out what's going on. Hello and welcome to everybody's favorite San Diego County Real Estate Information Program, San Diego Market Watch. Thank you for tuning in. If you're new to this channel, please give us a like and subscribe so you don't miss any of these weekly updates. We are bringing you the major metrics in the San Diego County Real Estate Market each and every week. So you don't wanna miss that. Now let's get right into what's happening here this week. Looking at what has happened the first couple of weeks of 2026, we have seen increasing inventory, which is no surprise as we enter a new year. Although this is following months and months and months of declining inventory. Inventory had been declining since the middle of the summer and now bouncing back up. So that decline was more than just seasonal. It had been going on for many months and has now bounced back up a little bit. Although that's really based on the first week of the year, we had a huge surge in new listings, which has definitely leveled off in the second week. So sellers were eager to come out of the gate with their new listings in 2026. Buyers not quite as eager. Buyers taking more of a wait and see approach here as pending sales shown here in green came up, but not nearly as much as new listings. Now let's take a look at price reductions. Not as many of those either in the second week of 2026. So that shows us that in the first week of the year, listings that had been sitting around, those sellers were anxious to get those listings out there and refresh them with a new price to try and attract buyers here in the first part of 2026. Median price was up from November to December. That's the second month in a row of increasing median price after a couple of months of decreasing median price, basically continuing the trend that has been going on for a couple of years now, which is up and down with median price. Looking at interest rates, the seven-day Friday MAC average is 6.06, which is down from the previous week. Now this is a fairly sharp decline. We haven't seen this much of a drop in quite a while, and this is after rates actually dropped into the fives briefly last week on an announcement from the White House that they were directing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to pick up $200 billion in mortgage-backed securities. Now this pushed rates down temporarily, the mere mention of it. Will the actual mortgage-backed security purchases bring rates down more? Only time will tell. For perspective, the Federal Reserve was buying mortgage-backed securities and U.S. Treasuries between 2008 and 2022 to the tune of nearly $8 trillion. That's what got interest rates down into the twos and threes. So 200 billion, while a lot of money, is a drop in the bucket compared to what the Fed had done during these periods of quantitative easing or whatever else they were calling it at the time. So it's a little bit of a twist on that old play to get interest rates down, and we will see whether or not this $200 billion purchase actually happens, what it does, and if that program continues after the hypothetical initial purchase. Either way, it brought rates down below six for the first time in a very long time last week, bringing that average down. And this is good for both buyers and sellers. It makes homes more affordable for buyers. It gives sellers the opportunity to think about making that move that they've been hesitant to make because they're hanging on to that low-rate mortgage. Still in the sixes, though, most experts think that we need to get down into the mid-fives to really let the floodgates loose, and all of that remains to be seen. So that's what's happening in San Diego County real estate this week. If you enjoy this content, please remember to like, share, subscribe, and comment. Stay tuned for more great real estate information as we have been bringing you for years and will be bringing you in 2026. So again, thank you for tuning in, and we'll see you right back here.