San Diego County Housing Market Forecast 2026

San Diego County’s countywide median of $899,000 doesn’t tell the full story of early 2026. A listing in Escondido last week had been on market 67 days with two price reductions and went pending well below the original ask, compared to 2022 when a property in that zip code would have had multiple offers by the first weekend.

Sellers past 45 days on market are working with a different reality than the headline numbers suggest. I’ve been buying in San Diego County since 2008, and what I’m seeing at the individual property level is more complicated than the median implies.

Prices in Early 2026

Zillow had the county-wide typical home value at $928,459 as of February, down 2.1% year-over-year, and Redfin was running the county median sale price at $899,000 for the same period, down 0.11%.

Riverside County was tracking around $600,000 at the same time and San Bernardino around $545,000. OC and LA move-up buyers are still part of the active pool here partly because of that $300,000-plus gap, even in months where the countywide trend runs slightly negative.

Redfin has days-on-market at 35 days countywide in February, up from 29 days a year earlier, and Zillow’s median days-to-pending came in around 27 for the same period. That 27-day pending figure is usually where the conversation about what the listing experience is going to look like ends up going.

I ran through the payment math with a seller in Chula Vista recently and the number landed harder than she was expecting.

At $899,000 with 10% down at 6.22%, the principal and interest is somewhere around $4,960 a month before taxes and insurance. For a seller who’s been on market two months asking why buyers aren’t showing up, hearing that number usually changes what they want to talk about next.

Inventory and Volume

Active listings came in at 3,268 countywide in early 2026, up 7.77% year-over-year, and Redfin reported 1,738 homes sold in February, up 2.3% from the same month last year.

The buyers I’m talking to who are still active have more leverage than they had a year ago, especially on anything that’s been sitting past the 45-day mark and had to take a price adjustment to get there. A few of them have been sitting out since early 2024 and are starting to make offers again now that they have more options and less competition on the properties they want.

About 11% of San Diego County households can qualify for a median-priced home at current rates, which was already a low figure before rates started climbing and hasn’t improved since. Most of the calls I get about thin showing traffic end up there pretty fast.

Redfin has the sale-to-list ratio at around 99% countywide, and in most of the deals I’ve seen close this year the buyer was already committed by the time they made the offer. The transactions that didn’t get there usually had a seller holding an ask above where buyers were qualifying, and by the time we talked they’d been carrying the property longer than they expected.

I’m a cash buyer in this market and have been making offers here since 2008. My read on these conditions comes with an obvious stake in how sellers interpret the data, and I try to be clear about that.

Four Very Different Markets Inside One County

I’ve had sellers in this county price their property off comps from a zip code 40 miles away because they figured San Diego was San Diego. Most of the time the agent pulled whatever was available in MLS without filtering for the submarket, and the seller had no way to know that until I asked about it.

The county stretches from the coast to the desert communities near Borrego Springs and from the South Bay near the Mexican border up to Camp Pendleton. A buyer in Chula Vista running VA financing is looking at a different affordability ceiling than someone coming from Orange County to buy in La Jolla, and the data doesn’t separate those two situations.

Coastal San Diego

In La Jolla and Encinitas and Del Mar the buyers I’ve been talking to lately tend to come in with equity from somewhere else or paying cash, which means the rate math hits them differently than what I see from the buyer pool in El Cajon or up in Escondido.

I’ve watched coastal listings sit when they came in above where buyers would finance, and when the sellers eventually adjusted they found the market, but a few of them went through four or five months of carrying costs they weren’t expecting before that happened.

East County and Inland

East County is where I’ve done a lot of our direct-to-seller work over the years, partly because the inventory in that part of the county skews toward entry-level and there’s a higher concentration of properties with condition or tenant complications that make a traditional listing harder to run.

In April 2022 we closed on a property on Winter Gardens Blvd in El Cajon for $350,000, repaired it and resold at $518,000. That kind of spread has gotten tighter since then and a deal like that today would probably look more like 8 to 10 percent on the buy side rather than the 30-plus we were seeing at the peak.

North County

In August 2025 we closed on a property on Goldenrod Street in Escondido for $520,000, a deal where the seller wanted a clean close and didn’t want to go through the listing process in a market that was already showing mixed signals in North County.

That property resold at $547,000 once it was repositioned, a spread of about 5 percent on the buy price, tighter than similar deals we were doing in Escondido in 2021 and 2022 when margins were running 15 percent or more.

South Bay

I get a steady stream of calls from the South Bay where the seller just got PCS orders and needs to move faster than the listing process allows. Miramar and 32nd Street Naval are both in the county and Camp Pendleton is just up the coast, and the relocations they generate run on a schedule that doesn’t care what the market is doing.

In early 2026 I’ve seen more VA-financed offers on Chula Vista and National City properties than I expected given where rates have been sitting. VA buyers qualify on monthly payment, not on accumulated down payment savings, and a rate environment that sidelines conventional buyers needing 10 to 20 percent down doesn’t pull them out the same way. I’ve watched the buyer pool in those submarkets hold up in conditions where the countywide affordability data would have predicted a wider pullback.

A service member who got orders in March and reports in June is closing a house in that window regardless of what the market is doing. The sellers we’ve talked to in that situation aren’t trying to optimize the number. They need a firm close date they can plan around, and those conversations get to the timeline question faster than almost any other call we take.

We’ve talked to sellers who were already at their new duty station and their San Diego property still hadn’t closed. Most of those calls came after a listing had stalled and the gap between what the seller needed the timeline to be and what escrow was delivering had already turned the situation into a problem.

Two Deals That Show What the Range Looks Like

Goldenrod Street, Escondido

A seller reached out to us in mid-2025 about a property on Goldenrod Street in Escondido. He’d been watching market times stretch out in North County and wanted to know what he was getting on a close without the back-and-forth of a listing.

We came in at $520,000 with a clean 30-day close and the property resold at $547,000 once it was repositioned. Two years earlier in that submarket a deal like that would have penciled out at $580,000 or $590,000 on the buy side.

Linares Street, San Diego

The deal on Linares Street in San Diego in March 2021 started with a trust property in the 92129 zip code, two sisters as co-trustees, a tenant who had verbally agreed to buy in 2019 and dragged it out through all of 2020 until the eviction courts stopped processing cases entirely once COVID hit.

No mortgage on the property, so the sellers weren’t in financial distress, they just needed someone who could work sight unseen with the tenant still in place and close in 10 days. We came in at $535,000 on Linares Street and the property sold at $600,000 after the occupant situation cleared.

If you’re working through a trust or inherited property or dealing with a tenant situation, those come up in San Diego County pretty regularly. The path through them usually depends on whether there’s a mortgage and whether everyone who needs to sign is reachable and in agreement, and in my experience that’s where most of the complications come from.

What Sellers Are Running Into Right Now

A lot of the sellers I’ve been talking to who listed in late 2024 and haven’t closed came in priced above where buyers are qualifying at current rates. Some have a property that needs work the current buyer pool isn’t willing to absorb at the asking number, and the carrying costs have added up more than they expected by the time we’re talking.

If rates move toward the 5.9% range by year-end like some economists are projecting, that should bring some of the buyer pool that’s been sitting out back into the market. The pending count being up 2.3% year-over-year suggests part of that pool is already moving when it finds a price that works at current rates.

Sellers going back on market now are also competing against 7.77% more inventory than they would have faced a year ago, and buyers in this county are more aware of what’s on the shelf than they were 18 months ago when there was less to choose from.

If you’re trying to work out whether listing or a direct sale to a cash buyer makes more sense for your situation, the calculation that usually surprises sellers is what it costs to sell a house in California once you factor in commissions, repairs, and carry time. The gap between a cash offer and a listing’s actual net usually ends up a lot closer than sellers expect when they first see both numbers.

If You’re Thinking About Selling in San Diego County

We buy homes across San Diego County and I’m happy to give you an honest read on what a direct sale would look like for your property. Part of my background is seven years as a certified residential appraiser, starting in 2003, and after over 400 transactions across all five Southern California counties since 2008 I’ve found the most useful thing I can do is run both numbers with a seller before they decide.

I should be upfront that I’m a cash buyer which means I have an obvious stake in that conversation, but there are plenty of people I’ve talked to who ended up listing and it was the right call for their situation.

If something about your situation makes the traditional listing process harder to work with, you can reach us at (951) 331-3844 or request a cash offer and I’ll walk through what both options look like.

Written and reviewed by Doug Van Soest, former California Certified Residential Appraiser (seven years, starting 2003), and Andrea Van Soest, licensed California real estate agent (DRE #01505854) since 2005. Together they have closed over 400 transactions across Southern California since 2008.

Last Updated May 2026