This fall, Rishabh Kumar spent hours scanning home listings and touring open houses. He and his wife hoped there would be fewer homebuyers searching this time of year, especially with interest rates climbing back up again, but that hasn’t been the case.
“We’re trying to find a sweet spot and felt that, because interest rates are high, we would get lucky and there would be some dampened competition,” said Kumar, 33, who works in marketing at a tech company. “But we’ve made two offers that we were both outbid on.”
Home sale activity in the nine-county Bay Area in November rose 14% for single-family homes and 29.4% for condos from last year, according to recently released data from the California Association of Realtors. Buyers and sellers alike seem to be coming to terms with higher interest rates, which in November hovered around 6.8% for a 30-year-fixed-rate mortgage…