Welcome to the new hottest housing market in America: Daly City.

Also South San Francisco, Mountain View, Fremont, San Jose, and San Mateo. According to the real estate site OpenHouse, these were six of the ten cities US cities that sold the greatest percentage of homes for over the asking price last week.

And yes, Daly City came in first place, with 92 percent of sales busting initial expectations.

As usual, a few caveats: It’s only one week, only one site, and we all know that clever realtors can rack up impressive sounding stats about selling over by just pricing the house lower than they know it will go in the first place.

But the absence of San Francisco itself on the list piques our curiosity. Does the OpenHouse claim check out?

By way of a quick and dirty test, we compiled the prices of all of houses listed as sold on competing site Realtor.com.



This highly unscientific survey found that of 15 homes sold in Daly City last week (July 10-16), only two failed to break their initial asking price. That’s a rate of about 86 percent. Not quite as popular as OpenHouse would suggest, but still nothing to sneeze at, either.

Meanwhile, in San Francisco, 102 homes sold in the same period, and only 62 managed to rise over their initial asking price. (Although quite a few sold for precisely the list price.)

That ratio of just over 60 percent is indeed low enough to keep the city out of OpenHouse’s top ten, with the number ten spot going to San Mateo at 63 percent.

OpenHouse suggests that this is an indicator that San Francisco is starting to simply max out what even some of the wealthiest homebuyers are willing to pay. Attention, it seems, wanders to cheaper nearby alternatives.

We’re reluctant to draw a big conclusion only from Daly City’s small pool of 15 or so sales for one week. But if this trend continues for enough weeks, we might indeed start to see the upper Peninsula’s stature rise, as the site suggests.

The rates for the rest of the Bay Area cities were 83 percent for South San Francisco, 78 percent for Mountain View, 73 percent for Fremont, and 63 percent for San Jose.