"At a Glance" Local Housing STATS and News 08/10/26

30-Year Fixed: 6.74% ▼ 0.03%  |  15-Year Fixed: 6.25% ▼ 0.05%

Rates came down. The 30-year fixed fell 3 basis points to 6.74% and the 15-year dropped 5 to 6.25%, both on Friday’s weak jobs report.

The negotiating position has shifted, and this is the number to bring to clients. Redfin says homes sold below asking in 38 of the 50 biggest U.S. metros, and only 25% of homes now sell above asking. For anyone who spent the last several years telling buyers to expect competition, that advice is out of date in most of the country. The cause is supply: places like Florida and Texas built heavily, and buyers there now have real choice.

Be careful applying that here, though, because our market is not those markets. The Bay Area did not overbuild. What we have is a slow thaw, not a glut, and the local numbers below show it: inventory drifted DOWN since Friday while the coming soon pipeline grew. Limited supply with sellers waiting for a better moment is close to the opposite of Tampa or Austin.

Homebuilders are consolidating. Dream Finders is buying Beazer for $916 million all cash, and Berkshire Hathaway bought Taylor Morrison in late July for $6.8 billion. Two large acquisitions inside a month is a pattern, not a coincidence. When building slows, the cheapest way to add homes and land is to buy a company that already has both.

Why a REALTOR® cares: Friday delivered the thing buyers have been waiting on, and it came in the least comfortable way possible. Rates fell because hiring went negative. If you have a client on the fence, the honest framing is that their borrowing cost improved because the labor market weakened, and those two facts do not cancel out. A cheaper payment is worth less to someone newly worried about their job. Ask about the job first.

Today’s live board across our five focus cities shows 715 homes a buyer can actually pursue right now, down 13 since Friday, including 53 brand new listings and 110 more coming soon. The full, always-updating ledger lives at harvrealtor.net/live-inventory.

Today’s Live Inventory (buyable now)

• Fremont: 279 available (206 active, 18 new, 55 coming soon)
• Hayward: 201 available
• Milpitas: 107 available
• Newark: 81 available
• Union City: 47 available

Median asking prices: Union City at $1,298,000, Newark at $1,249,000, Fremont at $1,289,000, Milpitas at $1,150,000, and Hayward at $849,000. Median days on market runs from 25 in Fremont and Newark to 34 in Hayward. Board-wide the 15-city table carries 2,712 listings, down 15 since Friday.

Newark was the only city to gain, up 4 to 81, and it added 11 new listings, the most of any city relative to its size. Everywhere else gave ground: Fremont shed 9, Hayward 4, Union City 3, Milpitas 1. The detail that matters is Fremont’s coming soon count, which rose again to 55 even as its total inventory fell. Sellers are staging listings rather than launching them, and the typical Fremont home is still going in 25 days.

US 10-Year: 4.65% ▼ 0.04%  |  Gold: $4,334 ▼ 0.22%  |  Silver: $63.92 ▲ 0.29%  |  Brent: $83.55 ▲ 1.29%

The July jobs report came out Friday and it was the first negative month in years. Employers cut 23,000 jobs. Forecasters had expected a gain of about 83,000, so the miss was more than 100,000 either way you count it.

Read one layer down, because the headline misleads in an important way. Government payrolls fell 53,000 while private employers actually added 30,000. The negative number is a government story, not a collapse of the private economy. Leisure and hospitality shed about 40,000, which is the part worth watching, since that sector hires quickly when consumers feel good and stops just as fast when they do not.

The unemployment rate fell to 4.1%, and this is the second thing the headline gets wrong. It did not fall because people found work. It fell because people stopped looking, and someone who is not looking is not counted as unemployed. A jobless rate improving for that reason is a warning, not good news. Wages say the same: average hourly earnings are up 3.2% over the past year, the smallest increase since May 2021.

The 10-Year closed Friday at 4.65%, down 4 basis points, as money moved into bonds on the jobs news. Gold is $4,334 an ounce this morning and silver $63.92, both readings spanning a thin weekend market. Brent settled at $83.55, up 1.29%, still carrying the Strait of Hormuz risk premium from late last week. Separately, the White House is again trying to remove Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook; the Supreme Court shut down the earlier attempt. It matters here for what it signals, which is pressure on the Fed to cut faster.

Why a REALTOR® cares: last Thursday we wrote that soft jobs data kept failing to move mortgage rates, and that you should not promise clients relief on a schedule. Friday is what it looks like when the mechanism finally works. Payrolls went negative, the 10-Year fell, and mortgage rates followed it down. That is the sequence. It just does not run on a calendar.

S&P 500: 7,758 ▲ 0.62%  |  DOW: 54,037 ▲ 0.28%  |  NASDAQ: 26,691 ▲ 1.30%

Friday closed green across the board. The NASDAQ led, up 1.30% to 26,691, the S&P 500 added 0.62% to 7,758, and the Dow rose 0.28%. A weak jobs report usually knocks stocks down. This time it did the opposite, because a soft labor market makes a Fed rate cut more likely, and cheaper money is worth more to the market than strong hiring is.

Airbnb was the standout, up 17.43% after beating expectations and crediting AI for the gains. Its CEO said AI is letting the company ship product updates faster without adding staff. That is the version of the AI story investors are paying up for right now: not a new product, just the same work done with fewer people.

Berkshire Hathaway spent $4.5 billion buying back its own stock last quarter, against roughly $235 million in the first quarter. Greg Abel took over from Warren Buffett earlier this year and inherited close to $400 billion in cash, so a buyback that size is the first real read anyone has gotten on how he intends to operate. Elsewhere, the White House put a 15% tariff on imported polysilicon, the raw material in solar panels and chips, and solar names moved on it: Sunrun rose 8.74%, Enphase 5.55%, First Solar 2.42%.

BTC: $64,185 ▼ 1.53%  |  ETH: $1,876 ▼ 2.57%  |  XRP: $1.02 ▼ 1.97%

A soft weekend, with all three majors down between 1.5% and 2.6% over the past day. The bigger picture is that the leading coins sit more than 40% below their October record highs, and the industry is hunting for a new story. The one it has settled on is AI: the pitch is that software agents, not people, will be the next wave of users, paying and trading on their own, and exchanges including Coinbase and Kraken are building tools aimed at machines rather than humans. Whether or not the thesis holds, it tells you the sector no longer expects retail enthusiasm to carry it. Regulators had a win too, cutting off an Iran-linked exchange that had moved more than $6.3 billion for sanctioned parties. The detail worth noting is how it was caught: public blockchains record every transaction permanently, so the transparency crypto is often criticized for is exactly what made the money traceable.

Disclaimer: The market data, rates, and information provided are for informational purposes only and should not be considered financial advice. Always verify rates and data with your lender or financial advisor before making any decisions.