How Sales Pace Slows in Fall

Every year it seems, Fall turns strange in local real estate. 

By this time of year, we've long-since finished with the busy Spring market, and Summer was whatever it was (often sluggish and muggy, with the occasional burst of sales).

By October, a lot of buyers and sellers are thinking about next year.

In a pattern as natural as leaves turning brown and falling, the pace of home sales slows, until it's at its ebb for the year, December.

We've been thinking about that, here in October, and decided to make a chart.

This is a noisy chart, admittedly, but we wanted it first and foremost to show trends. 

The dark blue line shows the 10-year average of pending sales, month-by-month, throughout the second half of the year. It mostly points down, especially at year end.

While typical months in Q3 see new deals for Manhattan Beach homes inked at the pace of about 1 per day (low 30s for the month), this dips to an average of 23 for November, and just 15 in December.

That's average.

But you can see how almost every year dips as the calendar flips.

Comparing Key Years

Of course 2020 is the green line that's a huge outlier – a year like we may never see again.

The orange (partial) line is 2025 data, which is presented in order to compare with the pace seen in 2023 (yellow) and 2024 (lavender).

Right now the chart is showing our pace of new escrows in the second half to be above dismal 2023, but slightly behind 2024, which we have previously labeled a "recovery year." 

2025 is also lagging behind the 10-year average. 

October 2025 So Far

We're only part way into the month of October, so it's a bit early to provide any data. 

We collect our twice-monthly market data at the end of the 15th or morning of the 16th, so we don't have full first-half-of-October data yet. 

But at this writing, we see 10 new escrows so far, lagging the average of 15 and last year's 16, but better than 2023's mere 6 deals for Oct. 1-15.

What People Are Seeing, Saying

There is some concern we're hearing out there about the market getting wobbly. 

As noted at the start of this piece, however, that's what happens every year around this time, as things slow. 

Some listings can't buy a showing. 

Others are selling.

One, notably, after making 6 price cuts over 90 days to convince buyers they were serious (1505 11th). Another had just returned to market after a 15% price adjustment (2716 Highland). 

There were 3 little homes in OK locations. 

But there were also two over $8M that really hadn't hung around much. 229 24th is a walkstreet Spanish, and 300 Kuhn is a partially complete new construction project asking $9M, with millions more to go to finish it. Kuhn flew off the shelves. 

We're intrigued by the sight of new buyers just now entering the market – reaching out to us, or touring and popping into our listings.  

If there's anxiety out there, we haven't heard a ton from buyers yet. 

In 2019, we did. Buyers were getting bearish. They would say "why buy this year, when I can pay less next year?"

There was a veritable epidemic of buyer negativity.

Oddly, that downbeat sentiment coincided with rising sales at the time. Do you see the peak for October pending sales up in our chart? That was 2019!

That's right, sentiment is not strictly required to follow data. 

Buyers were partly correct at the time. The 2019 median home price locally fell 2%. 

They were wrong about 2020 being a better time to buy, however. After covid hit, it was off to the races.