Historically, the listing and sales data from the SFMLS is considered a “lagging indicator” of what’s happening in the San Francisco real estate market.  By the time a sale (“closing”) is posted in the MLS it’s up to three days later than the date the sale is recorded at city hall, plus it went into contract usually 20-30 days before that.  So sales data really reflects what buyers and sellers were thinking a month or more ago.

The closest “leading indicator” we could find on our MLS was the Hot Sheet Listings which show new listings in the last fourteen days**.  That data is what shows up in our New Listing Market Watch which we do every other Monday.  The report includes the number of new listings for single family homes and condos (including co-ops and TICs) regardless of configuration.  It shows the number and percentage of new listings that went into contract within the same fourteen day period and it shows how many price reductions have occurred on those same listings.  You can easily compare the current data with the prior two week period and with the same period a year ago.

We also publish a short commentary about each report on our blog:  boldsf.blogspot.com

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*We do realize one shortcoming of the MLS is its lack of comprehensive new construction data.  Some developers post a few representative units but none post their entire inventory.

**For those of you who use the MLS’ Hot Sheet Listing feature, the farthest “days back” you can set it for is fourteen days.