 |  | One of the most common questions real estate agents hear is, "How's the market?!" and if you ask 20 different agents, you'll likely get 20 different answers. If you were to ask me, I'd ask you whether your looking to buy, sell, or invest first, then based off of your response, I'd be able to give you the information you were looking for. As you can likely surmise, the condition of the market will vary depending on your specific intentions because what's considered to be a bad market for buyers, is typically a good market for sellers, and vice versa. Rather than giving you my opinion of the market, I figured I could just show you the concrete and empirical market information that stems from our local town's December sale history. For example, in December, Arcata's median sales price was $513,750 while the median sales price for Arcata in December of 2022 was $722,000! As you can see, Arcata's market came back down to earth over the last year with nearly a 29% reduction in sales price. McKinleyville was the inverse of Arcata, with a median sales price in December of 2022 of $465,000, while December of 2023 saw a median sales price of $652,500, a 40% increase! For Eureka, our largest market, things have remained pretty consistent with the median sales price for December of 2023 was $414,500 while the median sales price in December of 2022 was $419,000. As you can see, there can be a wide variety of answers that all correctly answer the same question of how the market is, it just depends on which information you focus on. If I hone my focus to Eurekas market, I would say things remain steady and affordable, whereas if I look at Arcata's numbers, I would say the market has flipped and the power now resides in the buyers hands (which is no necessarily true, there just happened to be lower numbers in the month of December in 2023). Which leads me to my point, the information you hear is only as good as the source that is supplying it, so please make sure and vet the professionals who you rely on so that you can make the best decision when the right opportunity presents itself.
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