Price cuts have been replaced by bidding wars. A once-sleepy downtown is flush with urban-renewal projects. A luxury condo tower with penthouses priced over $4 million is under construction. Sacramento, Calif., long seen as a fairly bland government town, is in the midst of a real estate boom.

When Suzanne Greer listed her six-bedroom home just outside of Sacramento last month, so many potential buyers showed up to the three-hour open house that her real-estate agent had to extend it by two hours. Offers started coming in that evening. Eight buyers entered a bidding war.

“We’ve been here 17 or 18 years and have never seen it like this,” says Ms. Greer, who, with her husband, owns a commercial air conditioning business. She sold the home for $40,000 over the $799,000 asking price—plus two months of free rent so she doesn’t have to move out right away while she builds a new home nearby.

Houses are moving fast. Homes in Sacramento have been selling in an average of 34 days—six days faster than they were at this time last year, and 28 days faster than the U.S. overall.

It is a dramatic turn of events for a city that just a couple of years ago was still struggling to pull out of a deep housing slump, even as other markets in California surged. Sacramento is finally seeing the kind of downtown resurgence that is been happening in cities across the U.S. over the past 10 to 15 years. And the region is partly benefiting from some spillover as San Francisco and Silicon Valley’s tech boom brings skyrocketing prices and a housing shortage, pushing buyers to look further afield.